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.