Dirt and noise - lo-fi and low-tech

Started in on the readings for week 3 today - on the topic "Dirt and noise - lo-fi and low-tech".

Unlike last week, the first reading was blessedly straightforward - unless I'm missing something. The basic premise of "The double logic of remediation" seems to be that while we are heading towards an ideal of a multitude of media, we are also increasingly wanting to break down the *way* we receive information, so that the medium itself is more or less invisible. The intersection of so many media - e.g a CNN news broadcast where the user not only sees the filmed footage, but scrolling headlines and an assortment of other media might also be mixed in - is termed "hypermediacy".

The reading apparently was published in 2000, although it seems like (and felt like to me) it had been written a bit earlier - all the example screensnaps are from 1998, and the focus on webcams (SO 1990s) and "pages whose graphic design principles recall the psychedelic 1960s or dad in the 1910s and 1920s" (from what I can see in the photocopy-mushed images, these are very much a "my first webpage" kind of look - the CNN homepage is hilarious, when you compare to the style of news sites today - it's got about 3 things on it!

Things are starting to get a bit more hands-on with Audio Production now - I've booked a DAT machine and microphone for the weekend cos I suddenly realised that I need to record my interview assignment this weekend because of being in Melbourne for David's wedding next week. We also have to record sounds in a studio - John found a broken lightbulb he was going to throw out, so I've nabbed it to see if I can manage to capture the sound on tape.

What do cyborgs eat?

OK. Starting in on my second time round with Margaret Morse's "What do cyborgs eat? Oral logic in an information society" It's a long article and I got a bit confused the first time round, so I thought it might be helpful (or perhaps just very very dull) to put down key points as I understand them as I go along. If it doesn't help, I'll know not to do it again :-)

to start: first impressions
After reading the article for the first time the other day, I came away a bit confused - I think my confusion has largely to do with Morse's term "oral logic". It wasn't clear to me exactly what she meant by this and some of the article seemed to do with actual culinary matters ("meat", "nonfood"), more of it seemed to do with the connection of the human and the technical, with forays into the subconscious of childhood, "cannibalistic fantasies", body-image realities and vs ideals, real food vs the genetically modified or purely synthetic "food" what might be termed "better living through science" - smart drugs and their effects, and finally excremental art. While some of what Morse said within these sections made a lot of sense, I've not quite been able to capture the direction of the whole.

so... on to take 2...

• "growing desire to disengage from the human condition"
• 2 bodies - the physical and the electronic avatar - suggestion that the physical has more disadvantages than advantages, whereas the avatar "has superpowers, albeit virtually, and is immortal" (capable of enduring endless deaths)
• definition of a cyborg: "a human individual who has some of its vital bodily processes controlled by cybernetically operated devices"
• Acknowledgement that the cyborg may not necessarily be considered as a literal being, but could be merely a fantasy - or a metaphor.
• "Willing the cyborg into being appears to be the equivalent of wishing the problems of organic life away"
• "The contemporary fantasy is... if the organic body cannot be abandoned, it might be fused with electronic culture in what amounts to an oral logic of incorporation"
• "context of body loathing and machine desire"
• Intro splits article into three sections:
  1. Oral logic of incorporation into the electronic machine (eating/being eaten or being covered by a second skin) - I take this to mean that our desire for technology leads naturally towards a desire to become one with it - by consuming it, being consumed by it or completely wrapping ourselves up in it.
  2. Famine vs abundance, fast vs fresh food - "in this cultureal context of ideological failure and the desire to become (not merely to have) electronic machines that food per se can be - at least symbolically - refused" (OK. haven't quite got this one even initially sorted yet...)
  3. Culinary and corporeal negation - virtual reality, fat-free fat, smart drugs, etc. So this I take to mean technologically-enabled ways of eating that negate the concept of eating to a certain extent.

Oral logic: The dialectics of incorporation
Not really getting this - too tired! - but here's a stab at it anyway:

Identification vs immersion - identification holding up a mirror, whereas immersion ("the 'immersive' aspects of electronic media") isn't just looking at something, it's being in the thick of it - "involves introjecting or surrounding the other (or being introjected or surrounded) and ultimately, the mixing of two 'bodies' in a dialectic (exchange of reasonable arguments, says dictionary.com) of inside and outside"

Identification associated with the cinema - depends on a certain distance; new media's immersive aspects pull the user right in and are dependent on direct user interaction and involvement. A movie will keep on playing whether you're paying attention or not - an interactive/immersive new media piece will only go so far without your input - in essence a symbiotic relationship between artwork and user??? certainly for the artwork - it can't proceed without the user, and I guess the user's interest makes them somewhat dependent on the artwork proceeding... oh dear. think I'm going to regret all this later. Anyway, next point:

Morse seems very keen to associate the act of immersion with eating - the way she describes it though (and the parallels she draws - eating/eaten, enveloping/being enveloped) seem to my admittedly fuzzy brain to draw perhaps an even closer parallel with sex. Even more than eating, sex is a corporeal function which overrides the feeling of being "incorporated" (does that make sense in this context) - it draws the participants out of the trappings of their bodies for a time, whereas while eating does sometimes have a similar effect, more often it is clearly associated with the body (i.e. after sex, one feels somewhat disembodied for a time, whereas after eating one frequently feels full, weighed down by what one has eaten [possibly sick] and more aware than ever of the presence of the body).

Next bit: use of "nonfood" - "Vitamin gels and chemical soups qualify precisely because they blur the categories of food and drugs" - I guess this then reduces the act of eating to the mere consuming of nutrients - eating as refueling rather than eating as a physical pleasure. Recharging the body too in ways that require a minimum of processing, a minimum of byproducts of consumption - "the strategy is not only to feed the mind but in the process to purify the body of organic deterioration".

I guess the human desire for immortality is an obvious aspect of human/technology hybrids - after all, it's been a recurrent theme down through the ages. Immortality in itself includes a negation of the physical body - it's the mind, the consciousness, the soul that appears to be the "live" part of us - in order to live on, it seems that we just need to fix the organic body's nasty tendency to break down and decay - to replace the dud bits with technology, either in part or wholly would seem to be the next logical step for an extreme technophile.

Not entirely convinced by her arguments in favour of cannibalistic fantasies - whether of another or of being oneself consumed. Does this come from Freud or someone?? Think I'd need to read more about the original reasoning behind this to really understand it - stated baldly it comes across as unconvincing.

Second skins: "the cannibalistic fantasy of introjection has a counterpart in the reverse gesture, that of covering oneself with the other as a means of self-transformation". Not sure where her examples - Aztec rituals, conquistador massacres, flayings in Yugoslavia - are intended to be applied here.

"When political boundaries fall apart, ego and identity are also threatened with fragmentation, and they must be radically fortified or surrender to dissolution or transformation... an ordinary skin may no longer be enough to contain the ego or to protect bodily fluids from escaping or pollution and irritants from the outside world from entering" - simultaneously protecting/preserving the body and expressing it more dramatically perhaps? There's also the element of disguise, which is often an aspect of preservation.

Virtual reality: "the second skin (or 'interface') that mediates the virtual world also masks the apparatus of that mediation. This masking allows the referential to appear to collapse into the symbolic field: to utter the symbol for an action is to perform the act itself"

Enough, I think (it is 1am now). Tomorrow, part 2...

Stelarc - extending the body

OK. The readings have helped ... a bit. I still say he's a strange strange man, but as they say, it takes all sorts to make a world, and if nobody was a little on the extreme side, then we'd never progress anywhere.

I've just finished reading Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford's Extended body: Interview with Stelarc which was surprisingly accessible and understandable.

I'd heard about Stelarc's suspension events, but hadn't realised that he'd started off working with ropes and harnesses. He switched to hooks through the skin after coming across Hindu Indian piercing practices (presumably something like the festival of Thaipusam as celebrated in Malaysia and Singapore) as a way of reducing the visual clutter of the ropes and harnesses - as Stelarc puts it, "all the ropes and harnesses were seen more to support the body than to suspend it, so when I first came across the notion of piercing the skin, I thought if you could suspend the body using techniques like these, then you would have a minimum of support, you'd have just the insertion and single cable." So I guess for Stelarc, the hooks enable his artwork to focus on the act of suspension rather than the technicality of achieving suspension. Although the grotesquerie factor rather makes one wonder if this is the case - yes, the visual appearance of the performance is simplified and the act of suspension is the focal point of attention - but to my mind, it's the focus because everyone is thinking "OOOUUUCHHHH!". Hmmm. Apparently with the Indian (and also North American) rituals, there's a key element of trance which results in participants feeling no pain, experiencing little bleeding and no post-event scarring. Seems that Stelarc does not go into trances for his performances. In the interview, he states: "For me there was no religious context, no shamanistic yearnings, no yogic conditioning that had to do with these performances. In fact they occurred in the same kind of stream of consciousness. I mean, I don't take any anaesthetics, I don't chant or get into altered states"

He also talks of his suspension events linking primal yearnings and contemporary reality - primitive suspension rituals relating to a primal desire for floating and flying compared to present day zero-gravity floating of astronauts... The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased." (Hmm. I was having a thought when I started typing this but it seems to have run away. Maybe it'll allow itself to be recaptured later on...).

I found it interesting that while reading this interview with Stelarc - and the other readings I've gone through so far for this week's class (most notably "What do cyborgs eat?" by Margaret Morse) - that what has most been brought to the fore in my own mind are two of my favourite TV shows - Buffy and Dark Angel. The Buffy episode I was especially thinking of was the one where Willow starts an internet relationship - which turns out to be a demon trapped in the internet - from a flesh body, he has been trapped within a book, and has been released into the internet through scanning the text - kind of like what Morse seems to be heading towards in her article, where the body in this age of technology has become more or less obsolete as we more and more focus on the life of the mind and our bodies are more and more neglected by lack of maintenance and poor diet. Dark Angel of course is all to do with genetic engineering and in the second series looks at synthetic implants, and nanotechnology. Not sure that I'll bring up my pop-culture meanderings in class though - I don't think my thoughts are well-enough ordered yet.

Don't think I can quite come at Stelarc's stomach sculpture yet though... that's GOT to be uncomfortable. I hope none of the bits drop off into his system... uuurrrrghhh.

An addition - 11:54pm
Thinking more about pop culture and how it tackles human vs machine and human-machine combinations... It may just be the shows I watch and the books I read, but there seems to be a clear consensus in shows and literature which does more than just tell a catchy story in favour of the human - in Buffy, technology is a useful tool - like magic, when it becomes more than just a way of obtaining necessary information, when it takes over the human, it leads to evil or at least wrongness and must be stamped down - cf Warren and the robot girl (and of course The Trio), Spike's Buffybot, Willow's internet 'boyfriend', Ted. CS Lewis' This Hideous Strength pits the human (and Christian) against the horrific might of science and the fascination it holds for mankind which gives it the power to largely do whatever inhuman things are required in the name of knowledge. Even a film like Terminator 2 supports the humanity-rather-than-machines ethos, with Arnie's cyborg gradually developing human-like characteristics (which the bad-guy cyborg never does) - but ultimately remaining machine and so being destroyed, leaving the humans in possession of the field - which hopefully due to the machine's assistance will remain human and avoid the destruction wreaked in the possible future where the machines take over. And of course The Matrix - where computers are 100% the bad guy and while humans use technology, it's to bring about the destruction of the machines and re-establish a society based on human values.

Actually, thinking of Buffy - ever noticed how many of the villains represent the human (or "human") being taken over by the non-human? Angel-turned-Angelus the Mayor-turned-big-snake, Adam (the cyborg par excellence), Ben-turned-Glory, Bad Willow? I can't quite remember the details of Season 7, but 5 out of 6 ain't bad!

Probably babbling here. Apologies if all this sounds incredibly trite - it *is* the middle of the night & I'm just trying to make some sense of what I'm reading!