CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics: New
Engagements, New Possibilities?
Organiser: Melanie Swalwell
Aiken, Edward (Syracuse University, USA)
THE PARTS AND THE WHOLE: MODERNIST APPROACHES TO FIGURATION
In the visual arts, today's concerns regarding technology,
embodiment/disembodiment and aesthetics might well be traced back to the work of
such late 19th Century photographers as Eadweard Muybridge and E.J. Marey and
such early 20th Century artists as Umberto Boccioni and Marcel Duchamp.
Muybridge and Marey used the most advanced imaging technologies of their day to
analyze human movement into discreet stages previously unseen by visual artists.
Boccioni and Duchamp joined this photographic heritage with Cubism to recast in
radical terms what had been the Western painterly tradition of figuration. In
spite of their stylistic differences, these photographers and painters shared a
general fascination with the increasing industrialization of modern humanity, a
theme central to this session.
Broadhurst, Susan (Brunel University,
United Kingdom) INTERACTION, REACTION AND PERFORMANCE: PHYSICAL/VIRTUAL
INTERFACE IN PERFORMANCE
As a result of new technological advancements such as motion capture and
artificial intelligence within performance practice, this presentation suggests
that new liminal spaces exist where there is a potential for a reconfiguration
of creativity and experimentation. These spaces are liminal in as much as they
are located on the 'threshold' of the physical and virtual. As a result,
tensions exist within the spaces created by these technological art practices.
In my work I explore performance practices which explode the margins between the
physical and virtual and what is seen as dominant traditional art practices and
innovative technical experimentation. This entails a collaboration with a
systems engineer. Our collaborative project, Blue Bloodshot Flowers, involves
direct real time interaction between an avatar - Jeremiah (a computer projected
image) and a physical performer. Jeremiah is programmed with artificial
intelligence therefore his behaviour and interaction is non-prescriptive.
Swalwell, Melanie (University of
Technology, Sydney, Australia) AESTHETICS, AVATARS, AND KINASTHETIC
RESPONSIVENESS IN QUAKE
In contrast to accounts which stress the amazing sensory experiences which new
technologies supposedly make possible, I want to think about an engagement with
technology which is rarely thought of in aesthetic terms. Granted, few people
associate aesthetics with computer gaming, however, computer gameplay is
relevant here for a number of reasons: it is a kind of cyborg relation; it
involves a playful engagement with technology; and it is sensorially intense,
often mobilising players' bodies in novel ways. In this paper, my concern is
with interactions between gamers and avatars, reported during research with
lanners. The significance of kinaesthetics in this relation, and the different
reality and materiality statuses which players cross through will be addressed.
The player-avatar relation is significant, I suggest, for the experimental ethic
it reveals, where new, non-standard relations with self, others and things
(including technology) are able to be tried out, tested.
Koski, Kaisu (University of Lapland,
Finland) NEW MEDIA AND THEATER, AN INTELLIGENT STAGE
Theaterplay can be seen as an integrated media-machine, where human, real,
representation and virtual combines. This offers new ways of presenting a body.
Aesthetically theaterspace is multi-layered. I'm preparing a theater-play in
which space will have artificial intelligence. In this context, the interesting
term for me is off-stage. I'm showing the off-stage space using real time 3D-
graphics interacting spatially and temporally with actor. There will be a lots
of room for chance; each show is different. Although actors have control of
space, there are also variable factors like lighting, sounds and of course
virtual representations of off-stage, to which an actor responds. My argument is
that interactions between virtual off-stage actors, live-actors and sensory
interfaces can present both new modes of existence and aesthetics.
Rossiter, Ned (Monash University,
Australia) PROCESSUAL AESTHETICS AND THE MEDIA SUBLIME: THE VIOLENT SENSATION OF
NEW MEDIA EMPIRICS
'Process as such', writes Michel Serres, 'remains to be conceived'. The
aesthetic dimension of new media resides in the processes the ways of doing,
the recombination of relations, the figural dismantling of action that
constitute the abstraction of the social. Herein lies the unconscious of the
code of new media empirics. The aesthetic that constitutes a code is only
possible through a process of articulation with modes of practice, of
interpenetrative moments, of duration. The media sublime unravels the security
presupposed by the political economy of empirical research on new media. This
paper investigates how a processual aesthetics of new media relates to the
network of material and immaterial relations between a Berlin NGO (German
Initiative to Ban Landmines, www.landmine.de) and anti-landmine work in Africa
and Cambodia. I argue that the violence instantiated by the landmine at once
destabilises the sovereignty of the state and conditions the possibility of 'a
democracy extended to things' (Latour).
Bodies, Technology, Aesthetics:
New Imag(in)ings
Rendell, Joanne (University of
Nottingham, United Kingdom) and Lewis, Brad (New York University, USA) CYBORGS
VS. CYBORZILLAS: INTRODUCING CULTURALBIOMED.ORG
In this paper we make a distinction between good cyborgs-which we just call
cyborgs-and bad cyborgs-which we call cyborzillas. We connect cyborzillas with
emerging forces of Empire and the role that bio-power plays in securing and
legitimizing Empire. We argue that future politics of cyborgs rests not on
whether we are all cyborgs (we are), but on how we are all cyborgs (as yet still
to be determined). Also, we introduce our own cyborg political efforts to
organize resistance resources and coalitions through putting together a web page
devoted to critical cultural studies scholarship of bioscience. Every bit as
organic and machinic as the cyborzillas we resist, we use the web site to put
our shoulder to the wheel of one bioscience future rather than another.
Doyle, Julie (University of Brighton,
United Kingdom) THE AESTHETICS OF GENDERED EMBODIMENT: TECHNOLOGY, ART AND THE
MEDICAL IMAGINARY
Through an examination of medical images of anatomy on the WWW, this paper
argues that junctures between medical and imaging technologies, and an
aesthetics involved in the production of these images, are crucial to
understanding conditions of gendered embodiment as effects of these contemporary
and historical relations. Technologies and discourses of representation used in
medical images of the gendered body offer a view that is both an aesthetic and
imagined experience. This experience corresponds to the foregrounding in
cyberspace of psychical and representational mechanisms of identification as
part of an embodied experience. Viewers' imaginative interaction with the imaged
cyberbody can be used as a model for the reconception of gendered embodiment as
an effect of psychical and aesthetic investment in this form. Offline
understandings of gendered subjectivity can be thus reconceived through this
paradigm, informed as these are by an eighteenth century medical imaginary from
which they emerge.
Mäkiranta, Mari (University of Lapland,
Finland) CORPORALITY AND MEDIA TEXTS
Since the 1980s, gender discourse has addressed the body: the focus has been on
the human as corporeal, carnal subject. The body has been seen as the subject of
action, experience, and significance. In terms of female bodies, then, questions
are raised regarding the significance of media texts and representations of
female bodies. Are new media artists able to produce new kinds of female images
with these technologies, images which avoid some of the difficulties of
objectifying bodies? What factors are involved in producing and understanding
female representations in popcultural mediatexts? I will consider the
representation of women across a variety of popular cultural forms, with the
help of some post-modern feminist theories. Using narrative analysis and
deconstruction, I will read the stories written both on the surfaces of material
bodies and bodies represented in particular media texts. Such a discussion
invites questions regarding the power structures that determine sexuality,
identity and body image.
Hatzimanolis, Efi (University of
Wollongong, Australia) NOSTALGIC TECHNOLOGIES OF THE BODY: CYBORG SEEKS
COMMUNITY
This paper is concerned with examining how the human body as a conceptual
category and haptic entity is being problematized through the proliferation of
cyborg categories of identity, especially through the use of the Internet. In
particular, the paper focuses on how the self-styled cyborg Steve Mann is
incorporating informatic technologies such as wearable computers which are
wirelessly connected to the Internet into the practices of his everyday life in
ways that work not only to define the body as a prosthetic. They also work to
re-define the common views of the body's relation to space and the material
world in terms of the haptic. Mann's creation of his 'info-haptic body' is used
to re-direct and transform 'seeing' into an energy more concerned with what has
been called the 'simulation of surveillance' at precisely the point at which he
claims to be resisting the state practices of surveillance.
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