Posthumanity: Merger & Embodiment

Posthumanity : Merger & Embodiment (ISBN 978-1-84888-018-4), 2010

2016

As a result of the international cooperation between cultural institutions, The Games Europe Plays – Body <> Tech brings to The Stephen Lawrence Gallery the work of six European artists and collectives who deal with ways the virtual world and technology can effect the human body and our perception of it. Interactive installations allow the public to experiment themselves, and sometimes to be intimately disturbed by the pieces. Interactivity has been a controversial subject within New Media Art [1], but the works on display demonstrate that a coherent engagement with the viewer-user is still possible. These works don’t simply exist in the world of aesthetics – as experimentation on the consequences of interaction between the human and the digital. Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, Ivor Diosi, Marco Donnarumma and Blast Theory stimulate reflection on identities, provoking a response towards pieces that can be perceived as disturbing or intrusive. Meanwhile, Designswarm and Grendel Gam...

The advance of digital technologies and evolution of cyberculture have rejuvenated Modernity's Cartesian dream of the pure mind achieving an unconditional freedom by leaving the body behind. The body, now more than ever, is perceived as another object in the external materiality where, as the lineage of Western thought so obstinately insists, the Truth is to be found. Eastern traditions like Sufi mysticism, on the other hand, offer a stark alternative: the physical reality is dismissed as illusion, the search for the Truth is essentially internal, and the self is not a segregated and detached entity but is an ever-interconnected part of the whole. We argue that leveraging both on the ancient wisdom of the East and the immense success of science and technology of the West, cyberculture can foster a new human condition of re-embodiment, interconnectivity, and re-unity. We maintain that contemporary arts, particularly in performative and collaborative forms, have much to contribute to this endeavor, and emerging technologies like biomechatronics and neuroprosthetics, which are acclaimed by some for their assumed contribution to the ideal of disembodiment, might be exploited by artists to promote a new understanding of embodiment and humanity's interconnectedness with the rest of the existence.

Thanks to its scope and associative power, the Web has become a new channel not only to release art projects, but also to make them viable in terms of production: both as producer (which allows the interactive creation and building of an opened art work) or as the disseminator of the message to be broadcasted. Part of the artistic production on the Web, unlike literature, theatre, and film, cannot be transferred to another means of communication without losing its primary characteristic: certain "products" only have a place in cyberspace. Nonetheless its dynamics are influencing all other means. With this in mind, artistic production -digital and contemporary -will be analysed considering the perspective of Nicolas Bourriaud, who considers the artist, Web surfer, and intellectual in the beginning of the third millennium as a "semionauta." The analysis will be focused on what the author calls "postproduction" and "relational aesthetics," and further concepts like "road map" and "deejaying," coined by him. Earlier references like Marcel Duchamp (ready-mades) and Andy Warhol (serial production and consumption: from the museum to the supermarket) compose an illustrative theoretical framework. Basically, the debate will be the reason why contemporary art involves a constant process of deconstruction / reconstruction. A process of recreation, even if the raw material is original, since there is already a base to create from (although it is not structured). The registered reality is re-built, or rather the fragments of this cropped reality. It is possible to change its order and narrative, its times and spaces. In the postproduction process, this fragmented reality will be manipulated and, inevitably, reframed. It could even contradict itself, denying its essence. As levels of manipulation are endless, neither do those of redefinition. Instead of questioning about where we are going, it would be better trying to identify where we are.

Idea Journal, 2020

At the 2019 Body of Knowledge Conference at Deakin University, I presented the third episode of performance-lecture series ‘Is My Body Out of Date?’ in collaboration with Melbourne-based artists Bon Mott and Sean Miles. Punctuated by quotes and phrases from a range of theorists, writers and artists including Karen Barad, Caroline Bassett, Laboria Cuboniks, Ian McEwan, Oscar Wilde, Yon Heong Tung, ETA Hoffman, Gilbert Simondon, and my drag character #Sergina, the performance (struck) poses (around) the question of whether, in a world that is increasingly managed and experienced online, our bodies, as our primary mode of interaction, may be beginning to feel out of date. Is our desire for sweaty, messy, fleshy physical co-presence out of whack with the agility, efficiency and value of our algorithms? Performed live at a laptop with Mott and Miles as physical #BackupBodies for my own body that didn’t fly from London for ecological reasons, this physical/digital screenshare performance wove in video documentation from previous #Sergina performances in order to confuse and conflate what was happening now, and what already happened, what was live and what was pre-recorded. Here we played with issues of perception, presence, liveness and the fantasy of the (ex)changeability of identity and ‘drag’ (performance) of physicality within an ever-shifting media present. What follows is a visual essay constructed out of the digital remnants of the performance: a (trans)script, a screen recording, screenshots and links to media located beyond the template of the text. The visual essay touches on key conference themes such as virtual embodiment, human/computer interaction, temporal coupling and time consciousness, knowledge-transfer and how technology affects the way we move, think and desire. Furthermore, the templates of Zoom video communications, of the laptop screen, of Chrome and the wider digital/physical conference model that hosted, directed (and dictated) the boundaries of our presentation reflect on the influence of design, layout and digit/al choreographies on the shaping and ordering of thought, knowledge and embodiment. See the rest of the article in 5 futher PDFs here: https://journal.idea-edu.com/index.php/home/article/view/360

From representation to abstraction and from the materiality of the object to the fluidity of experience, the trajectory of the artistic object from the beginning of the 20th century up until today has subjected it into a constant questioning of its material substance and an incessant expansion of its communicative means. As contemporary artists realize their work through time-specific –hence fleeting- actions, temporary installations and intangible bytes and pixels, the question of the immaterial rises as a challenging enigma that poses a new question to every answer attempt: Can we talk about immateriality and visuality within the same discourse? Can the immaterial be linked to the intellect and the corporeal at the same time? How can we experience it with the body? (Doctoral thesis in English and Spanish. See links for each language)

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2017

This paper explores the extension of the body through the technological architecture of interactive art installations. It incorporates and builds upon Don Ihde’s postphenomenological philosophy of technology to argue how tools extend and limit the human body. This work expands upon Ihde’s hypothesis to consider how technologically mediated bodies adapt to and co-create interactive experiences. Through a methodological framework of postphenomenology, this work uses Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1988) and Dennis Del Favero’s immersive artwork Scenario (2011) as case studies. Through application of Ihde and an interview I conducted with Del Favero in 2014, this paper examines how the body is mediated, extended and reduced into his artwork through motion sensing technology. It also considers Ihde’s concept of bodyhood as well as his specific ideas on human-technology relationships, which I argue can be broken down as a way to consider the composition of interactive art. Overall this paper considers the human body’s negotiation with technology as an interface that co-composes experientiality where users become postphenomenologically extended in interactive environments.

Computers and Composition: An International Journal, 2019

We begin with a differentiation between the body and embodiment-two distinct but interwoven concepts: the body as abstraction and generality; and embodiment as particular, corporeal process and experience. The body is a marked site/cite; that is, it is written. The body is composed (and decomposing). The body is delimited, though never in a fixed or static sense despite any desire toward, as N. Katherine Hayles (1999) asserted, "an idealized form that gestures toward a Platonic reality" (p. 196). When we write of the body, however, through and with our actual bodies (embodiment), we are always already speaking of and with a composition-a mark, a text, an ever-penultimate elaboration. But we are also speaking of a decomposition. As a rhetorical event, embodiment is the process of the revision, a practice of becoming. "In contrast to the body," Hayles (1999) noted, "embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. . . . embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference" (p. 196). Put differently, the body is abstract and normalized; embodiment is specific, of difference, nuanced, lived, and felt. The body is a noun (product/being); embodiment is a verb (process/becoming). The body is our name; embodiment is our breath. Embodiment, Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) claimed, "calls us to attend to what we just simply do, day to day, moving about, communicating with others, using objects that we simply use in order to make things happen" (p. 3). If material bodies constitute what we are, then embodiments constitute what material bodies do. Digital technologies have complicated and compounded the compositions and decompositions of the body and embodiment as such.

Qualitative Research, 2016

The turn to the body in social sciences has intensified the gaze of qualitative research on bodily matters and embodied relations and made the body a significant object of reflection. More recently post-humanist and new-materialist theories, together with scientific advances in digital and biotechnologies , have further unsettled and expanded this gaze. Alongside this, 'post-methods' scholars have called for social science to engage with and imagine more inclusive methodological possibilities that attend to bodily experiences and phenomena. This paper contributes to these debates within the context of qualitative research on the body in digital contexts in three ways: 1) we explore the potential synergies across the social sciences and arts to inform the conceptualization of the body in digital contexts; 2) we point to ways qualitative research can engage with ideas from the arts towards more inclusive methods; and 3) we offer three themes with which to interrogate and re-imagine the bodyits fragmenting and zoning, its sensory and material qualities, and its boundaries. We draw on the findings of an ethnographic study of the research ecologies of six research groups in the arts and social sciences concerned with the body in digital contexts. We discuss the synergetic potential of these themes and how they could be mobilized for qualitative research on the body in digital contexts. We conclude that engaging with the arts brings potential to reinvigorate and extend the methodological repertoire of qualitative social science in ways that are pertinent to the current rethinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.