Assignments

Due Next Week: February 11 (Virtual Bodies in Telematic Space)

1 – Reading

Steve Dixon, Virtual Bodies (pg. 211-220), Digital Performance, 2007

Be prepared to discuss the essay in class and see WordPress assignment below.

2 – Research Critique III: Virtual Bodies in Telematic Space

You will be assigned an artwork to research for a short 250 word hyperessay about the work, the artist, and how it relates specifically to the topic of next week. Incorporate the reading (see above), as relevant, into your research post, discussing how it relates contextually to the work you are critiquing. Use next week’s Lecture Notes in Virtual Bodies in Telematic Space page of the Syllabus to prepare your research, where you will find documentation and links about each of the works.

Here are additional instructions for the research critique:

• Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
• Add a featured image
• Apply the “Research” category
• Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class

Due in two weeks: February 18 (in time for Chinese New Year break)

3 – Micro-project IV:  The Telematic Embrace

In this micro-project, in preparation for Annie Abrahams’s performance later this semester, we will use web-conferencing as a medium for distributed performance. “The Telematic Embrace” will involve the coordination of actions, spoken texts, and physical objects in the construction of a networked collaborative workshop performance. This project will be created in next week’s class.

• Micro-project IV in Project Assignments
  

Outline

Hyperlecture Week 4: The Body as Instrument

Works for Review

Gilbert & George, Living Sculptures (1967 – present)

Whilst still students, Gilbert & George made The Singing Sculpture, which was first performed at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in 1970. For this performance they covered their heads and hands in multi-coloured metalised powders, stood on a table, and sang along and moved to a recording of Flanagan and Allen’s song “Underneath the Arches“, sometimes for a day at a time. The suits they wore for this became a sort of uniform for them. They rarely appear in public without wearing them. It is also unusual for one of the pair to be seen without the other. The pair regard themselves as “living sculptures”. They refuse to disassociate their art from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art. They were listed as among the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013.

Stelarc, Ping Body, (1993)

From Media Art Net: In Ping Body, Stelarc’s work is electronically linked through a performance website allowing the audience to remotely access, view and actuate Stelarc’s body via a computer-interfaced muscle-stimulation system based at the main performance site. During the Ping Body performances, what is being considered is a body moving not to the promptings of another body in another place, but rather to Internet activity itself – the body’s proprioception and musculature stimulated not by its internal nervous system but by the external ebb and flow of information. The Ping Body performances produce a powerful inversion of the usual interface of the body to the Net. Instead of collective bodies determining the operation of the Internet, collective Internet activity moves the body. The Internet becomes not merely a mode of information transmission, but also a transducer, effecting physical action.

Marina Abramovic, Imponderabilia, 1977

Moving on to Marina Abramović: since the late 1960s, she has been creating performance art that is particularly concerned with the artist as subject and the body as a sculptural element. Her intense subjectivity has involved extensive use of her physical presence (often naked) as an agent of protest, demonstration, and personal liberation. Rather than creating a work as distinct or separate from herself, she appears in the work as a self-portraying live artist. While most of her works are solo performances, much of her early work until 1988 was created in collaboration with her partner Ulay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QgeF7tOks4s

In 1977, on occasion of their participation in a group show at the Galleria Civica in Bologna, Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay stood, completely naked, facing each other, in the narrow entrance to the exhibition, leaving only a restricted passageway which could be used by one person at a time, moving sideways and pressing against both of the artists’ bodies. The artists themselves, immobile, appeared to be immersed in an interplay of intimacy excluding all else, while the members of the public wishing to enter or leave the exhibition area were obliged to squeeze between their naked bodies: a moment of forced physical intimacy set against a gaping emotional divide.

With Inponderabilia, Abramović and Ulay stand at the entrance to the gallery, facing each other, their naked bodies creating a narrow portal through which the viewer must enter the space. The viewer decides which way to proceed: whether to face the male or the female figure. The work is a participatory exercise in choice, gender, and the vulnerability of the body. It also intensifies the subjective nature of the artistic process, in which the artists unveil themselves to the public through their work.

Eva and Franco Mattes, Reenactment of Marina Abromavic’s Imponderabilia, 2007

Re-enacting Imponderabilia literally implies transforming it into a script, and necessarily taking the media accounts of the event on board. Restaging it in a virtual world basically means planning everything: building the set, writing code to prevent the two actors from moving when they come into contact with another body, and writing other code to allow the spectators to squeeze easily through the narrow gap. On occasion of the New York festival Performa07, when Eva and Franco Mattes staged a live re-enactment of Imponderabilia, the other avatars present had two “scripted objects” at their disposal, positioned at the edges of the set: clicking on the left hand one meant you crossed the threshold facing Franco Mattes’ naked body, while clicking on the right hand one meant you came up against Eva’s synthetic physique.

Eva and Franco Mattes, No Fun (2010)

No Fun is the edited video of an online performance in which we simulated a suicide and filmed viewers’ reactions. It is staged on a popular website that pairs random people from around the world for webcam-based conversations. Thousands watched him hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly for hours, without knowing whether it was real or not. They unwittingly became the subject of the work. No Fun tries to create a situation of the most dire loneliness and affect, exaggerating the distance and lack of real engagement in online encounters, to slow down the endless social media flux with a moment of absolute reality.

Final Project

Review the requirements and objectives of the Final Project. Due at the end of the semester. Note that the first installment of the Project Hyperessay is due in two weeks, which will be your first opportunity to conceptualize your project.

Steve Dixon, Cyborgs

“We are already cyborgs,” declared Donna Haraway in her “A Cyborg Manifesto” from 1985. The quote below explains why.

“Technologies such as pacemakers, telephones, bicycles, automobiles, walking sticks and spectacles have already rendered us as cyborgs.”

Essentially, as “post-humans” we have become coupled with the machine, “cybernetic-organisms,” meaning that the organic and the machine have coupled into something combined. As we enter into the media space, are we becoming less human? Are we losing our sense of our bodies? Are we becoming disembodied in the cyborg phenomenon?

In 1997, the artist Eduard Kac implanted a networked computer chip in his leg in Time Capsule as an experiment in the human-machine relationship.

This was an extreme experiment, but how different from a pacemaker, earrings, or a hearing aid was this?

The Cyborg like the robot arouses fears and fascinations, and radically polarizes scientific and critical thought.”

Does the post-human condition alter our view of the body? What is the effect of the body as instrument as it enters into the cyborgian relationship with technology?

Stelarc: “The Cyborged body enters a parasitic/symbotic relationship with information.” Does this description of Stelarc’s work apply to all of us tethered to our mobile devices?

Stelarc used the Internet as a way to connect his body to the Network, to the mechanical, to the mechanical circulatory system of media and technology: ultimately to achieve a means of rendering the body as disembodied. He treated his body as an object to be manipulated, transformed, shocked and dismembered electronically.

In Exoskeleton, Stelarc used the machine to extend the mechanisms of his body, essentially creating a new skin our shell.

Aren’t we all wearing our exoskeletons as we extend our own bodies in space via the network?

Overview of the Adobe Connect web-conferencing system:

Adobe Connect Virtual Classroom: http://bit.ly/1trzhtK

(links below access the OSS User Manual)

• Install Connect add-in
• Logging In
• Checking Audio-Visual
• The Connect Room & Pods

We are going to have class from 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm while we are having remote sessions.

Micro-Project III: Disembodied

We will complete the Max projects in class, giving everyone a chance to performance their patches. Some questions and ideas to consider for the project, based on this week’s topic and discussion of works:

• What does it mean to be disembodied? How does the body react to the electronic or digital medium?
• How do we use our bodies as instruments in the media space, a space that is malleable and transformative?
• What is the potential for user interaction in relation to our bodies in the virtual space?
• How do our bodies change perceptually or virtually as a result of the transformations in the media space.

We will spend approximately 30 – 45 minutes completing the projects with time for performance and discussion. Be sure and connect the RECORDR object to save a video recording. I then want everyone to post the video with a short description of the results of the performance. Be sure and use the Micro-Project category.

Assignments for Next Week

Assign artworks for next week’s Research Critique and review other assignments.