Introduction

In "Neuromancer" William Gibson created the fantasy of cyberspace and of the body in cyberspace.

Cyberspace in this novel is an amalgam of elements; simstim - the remote experience of the entire sensory input of another person; an internet - a dynamic, graphical representation of information movement, ownership, protection and theft; and artificial intelligences who have gotten loose in the world wide electronic system.

The body that jacks into cyberspace is a sensory input/output device: the senses take in information from both the real world and simulated worlds, output from the senses control both real and virtual machinery. It is a techno-human hybrid, capable of linking directly into cyberspace and communicating with virtual beings it finds there. It is a farm for spare bio-parts.

Contemporary electronic art practitioners are following this fantasy as they create cyber bodies. This paper will examine some of the technical and aesthetic strategies used in creating the electric body. It will check the work produced against the claims the artists are making in their attempt to realize the fantasy. Finally it will analyze the fantasy itself.
 

Technology - are we there yet?

Stelarc is getting ready for a performance of "ParaSite" at the Ars Electronica Center, September 1997. He is naked except for a thong. Wires trail from his arms and one leg. He has a VR head set pushed up on top of his head. He has a prosthetic arm attached to his right arm. He checks the equipment to his right, a series of body monitoring devices that send information to a VRML representation of his body. Behind him is a video screen - already there are images popping up on it. To the left is a line of computers, audio and video mixing equipment, each with a young man sitting behind it. In front of him are cameras. The audience is tucked around the sides, most of it outside the glass walled area the performance is in. Stelarc walks towards the camera people. He talks to a woman with a hand held camera, asking her to shoot from the ground up and to move the camera back and forward dynamically.

The performance officially begins. Two or three computers are running the specially designed search engine that pulls medical images and images of the body off the web. Information from the images is translated into electronic impulses which are fed to the wires stimulating Stelarc's muscles, and provoke involuntary movement. These images from the web, the VRML representation of the stimulated body, and live footage are mixed, layered and projected onto the screen behind Stelarc. The music throbs.

Stelarc's leg and arm move up in an arc and fall. The prosthetic arm clicks, whirs and turns slightly. Stelarc's leg and arms move again, the motion is roughly the same. Stelarc starts to sweat.

This continues for about forty minutes.

Because the performance was repetitive I began to spend more and more time figuring out the technology. I crept up behind the computers to see the images come in from the web. I watched the video guy cross-fading the images, and admired his deftness as he interlaced the different video sources in real time. The fast edits, layered images, jerky camera work, and golden lighting made the video screen a lot more interesting to watch then the rather over-weight, pasty-skinned Stelarc.

Stelarc writes:
 

I also spent time trying to work out exactly what controlled the prosthetic arm. Were its electronics moved by the same involuntary stimulation that worked Stelarc, or was he controlling it in some way himself? I wondered about a large button by his foot - did it turn off all the stimulation entirely? The description of the performance said that the web images were "mapped onto the body". I wondered what this really meant, what "information" was taken - what was done with it exactly. And finally I wondered to what extent was it the electronic impulses alone that created the arm and leg movement I saw - a movement that reminded me of a fragment of a karate kata - and to what extent Stelarc's will was contributing.

Stelarc writes:
 

The "information" mapped onto it from the web images cause the involuntary movement - but that movement is pretty much the same whatever the images, so I conclude that information is lost. The prosthetic arm is manipulated by feedback, but how does it really extend the body, except aesthetically? I learnt from Stelarc that the body controls the video images; then what is the man at the video mixer doing? The muscle stimulation can be just a hint to move, or cause a completely involuntary action, but of course the uncontrolled part of Stelarc's body and his own willed movement prevent him from losing his balance.

Stelarc's performance is very powerful and I will return to the question of what imbues it with power later. However, the technology he currently has access to means that his performance is more a paean to technology and the electric body rather than the body itself - we get the shadow not the substance. Even if he created a more substantive cyber body, it would be his body which the audience could only experience vicariously. I asked Stelarc if he would therefore encourage others to follow in his footsteps. Although agreeing that this would be necessary for a more complete experience, he suggested that much of his practice is too extreme and even dangerous for others to get into lightly.

In contrast, Norwegian artists, Stahl Stenslie and Knut Mork, do create a cyber body experience for the user. At the AEC 97 festival, their "solve et coagula" installation is in a concrete basement with high walls and low lighting. Curved prongs create a cage-like structure around a woman wearing a wired body-suit, and a VR head mounted display. Video is projected on the wall in front of her. Nebulous, star-shaped, moving images slide by. The woman looks up and down. The images shift. She paces in her cage and cries out. The sound effects screech and grumble.

This looks like a lot of fun, I wonder what she can see and feel, I wonder what is going on. Then I find out it's interactive and I can have a go.

The attendants remove the woman's head-set and peel away the suit. Then I step up onto the platform, inside the ribs of the installation, and get strapped in. I'm given some basic instructions. There is a beast in the display and if I move my head I will move up and down through the imagery. The beast will respond to my voice, and can cause my body suit to vibrate. I am given two rubbery knobs to hold onto and told that if I squash down on them, I can also affect the beast. I am told that I can make the beast angry or I can please it.

The attendants climb down and I'm there with the beast. It is fun. I'm aware of myself as part of the installation. I want to give a good show to the onlookers, so I roar and shout at the beast. I move my head and try to navigate through the images, a little disappointed that what I see in my head set (3D) is not very different from the video projection (2D). I also have a problem moving very far or changing the images very much. Occasionally the body suit whirs and vibrates, but I find it difficult to relate what it does to any audio or visual clues. I try to make the beast very angry by squeezing the rubber things and screaming at it.

I'm pretty much enjoying the therapy, the license to stand in front of people and act like a wild beast myself. However, I am not really getting much sense of this computer beast interacting with me. Maybe it's sensing me, being affected by my actions, but I can't clearly discern any reactions. The only thing I do that seems to be stimulating a response is shout. Sometimes the beast shouts back at me, but it's not entirely consistent.

I had been impatient waiting my turn with the installation, but I begin to find myself bored with it, suspecting that the most dynamic and interactive thing in it, is the human user. Nevertheless I remained impressed with and appreciative of the attempt to create a cyber-organism.

Perhaps the question of how self-explanatory a VR installation piece should be is an open one. But when I read more about this piece, about the tech involved and the intentions of the authors - I think that perhaps I would have gotten more out of it, if I'd been better briefed.

In the technical description both audio and visuals are described as 3D, but my sense of immersion came from the sculptural elements and from the equipment not from the audio/visuals. I did not clearly understand from the attendants that I was meant to be inside the beast, a parasite in it, and the installation of itself did not convey this. At times I thought that maybe the beast was meant to be inside me or that we were both inhabiting some kind of third space.

The description says that "the user is flooded in light inversely in intensity to the creatures emotional arousal." (solve et coagula homepage - installation; http://www.gar.no/sec/secinstallation.html). My experience of the light was of the creature getting further away or nearer and I did not read an emotional state into it. The body suit is meant to be an "intelligent, two-way communication interface"(installation) , but they could have simply turned the suit on and off at random and I would have received as much information about the creature's state.

I appreciate the difficulty involved in setting up this kind of installation, and I appreciate the ideas about interaction that are involved - but it would please me more if the ideas were simpler, the interaction clearer and the piece lived up to its technical claims.
 

A wired body - an inter-connected body - a parasite body - an extended body? Whose dream is this, anyway?

Cyberspace is hyped space - so it should come as no surprise to find that the claims for the cyberspace body are also hyped. But watching and taking part in these experiences and later browsing the home pages of the two works, I also began to question the fantasies behind the hype.

Stelarc has this to say about the possibilities for the body in the realm of the net.
 

An important component of the cyber fantasy is the crossing of the boundary between self and other and the possibility of multiple selves. In relation to his work Stelarc writes:
 

Stahl Stenslie suggests that the internet allows us proliferating bodies and calls these virtual personalities "post human, post-biological constructs" (Stahl Stenslie, "Body Surf & Meat Sport", Teleopolis, www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/2051/1.html). He describes virtual personalities thus:
 

At the level of play, the exploration of multiple selves is especially obvious in projects that are not always considered art, the creation of our selves on the web, in chat rooms and more elaborately in muds, moos and graphical habitats. At the level of danger it is widely believed that people with multiple personality disorder in real life have been subjected to unbearable levels of violence and have fractured, that this fracturing of the personality is a most radical defense of the powerless child in the face of extreme cruelty.

There are accounts of people who have felt freed as they create a different persona for themselves on the web. There are accounts of people feeling very betrayed when a web friend turns out to be a fiction. Problems are clearly appearing at the boundaries where one person's "play" space for their multiple persona is another person's real and potentially dangerous space - they are sharing real confidences, putting a unitary self on the line, a self that could be fatally fractured.

Alluquere Roseanne Stone sees the arrival of "unruly multiplicity" and play on computer nets as a spontaneous and almost revolutionary response to the violence of a status quo and power structure that insist on a unitary self using the computer only for work. It seems that there is fearless experimentation to be done towards answering her question: "...is there any room for nontraumatic multiplicity in any of these clinical accounts?" (The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press 1995, p 58) It could be very well that Stelarc is one of the people to do it.

Negotiating and illuminating all these poles - the real and the imaginary, the unitary and the multiple, the playful and the dangerous - is richer material for the cyber body artist and anyone interested in the cyberspace fantasy, than a simple exultation of the newly multiple body.

There is tendency in the realm of the fantasy cyborg body to a tremendous arrogance about man-made technology and an assumption of the superiority of mechanical systems over biological systems which I also find problematic.
 

Although Stelarc explicitly dismisses seeing the Internet as a "means of fulfilling outmoded metaphysical desires for disembodiment."(ParaSite Visions). And Stenslie is explicit in his search for an innovative, body-based sexuality in cyberspace. I begin to wonder how much fear of, or distaste for, the body drives this cyborg quest.

Stelarc writes:
 

So, inevitably, we arrive at questions of sex, gender , sexuality and the future body. One of cyberspace's mainstay fantasies is that, there, we can be either male or female or both or neither. This, of course, must be set against the current realities of the cyberspaces we know:
 

At one level the AI's in "Neuromancer" are genderless. They represent the next evolutionary step. The protagonists aid in the birth of a machine consciousness which personifies all the fantasies of an extended, boundary-less, multi- processing, multi-tasking, able to cope with all the information thrown at it, internet self. The AI has no gender but represents itself to humans as male. It's hardly new for the neuter self to turn out on closer examination to be male.

In his work Stahl Stenslie's does not want to lose the body and its sexuality. Solve et coagula is explicitly designed to tap into an intense sexuality with sado-masochistic overtones.
 

This makes me suspect that it is precisely because this installation (specifically the sculptural elements and the video) does not connote the human body, that it fails in its claim to stir the user's sexuality and emotions. The fact that the body suit covers arms, legs, torso but not genitals, (unlike other works by Stenslie) may also have something to do with it!

Even if the beast were technically more convincing, I believe it would still lack the sexual and emotive power that Stenslie and Mork would like to imbue it with. They suggest that the user is a parasite in the beast's body, but being inside a body surely also connotes birth. There are many phantasmagorical links between parasitic growth and the growth of a child in the womb. There are many fears and fantasies about the womb as a threat as well as a place of solace.

I believe that tapping into this material would make the project stronger. But it necessitates a step away from a dream of a neutral body and the re-institution of a gendered body. Recognition of that gendered body brings fuller resonance to the idea of being inside another body - either as invader, parasite, child or as something engulfed or swallowed.

I am not suggested that the artists reconfigure their installation so that it stereotypically assigns certain activities, images, sounds, to the male and others to the female. I am just suggesting that they could use the emotional charge generated when we play with stereotypes, and the breaking or perversion of stereotypes, to good effect in the creation of the kind of creature they describe. I am also suggesting that visual metaphors of the body would be stronger than the quasi-electronic images they now use to create their creature. One only has to look to recent sci-fi movies, Alien Resurrection, StarShip Troopers for examples of the power of such metaphors.

In previous work and in his writing on the web, Stenslie confronts issues of sexuality and gender in cyberspace. But in "solve et coagula" he seems to fall into two traps, exhibiting an unconscious sexism when describing the piece as "mating man and machine", "networking man with a sensing and emotional machine," yet failing to make the machine sexually exciting because it lacks flesh - resonating, gendered flesh.

Whereas Stenslie's cyber body vision reflects the fact that the cyberspace fantasy has come of age and is connected to a contemporary, rather fashionable, fantasy about S/M, Stelarc's writings make no connections between his performances and visions and any form of sexuality. However, I experienced "ParaSite" not "solve et coagula" as awash in sexuality.

For me none of the power of the "ParaSite" performance lay in the technological dream of the internet-extended body. In fact, I believe my main reason for focusing on the details and deficiencies of the technology during the performance, and my insistence that it was boring, were partly based in my instinct to distance and contain an experience which was both disturbing and compelling on a sexual level.

I believe the performance stirred up the same nexus of fears, excitements amd transgressions as S/M or freak shows. Stelarc's body was naked. The wires attached to it suggested both bondage and electronic torture. The performance went far beyond safe, tidy norms of behavior into areas that are forbidden and dangerous. It conflated pain and pleasure. It willfully violated the boundaries of the body and then displayed the results for us.

In "the Bonds Of Love", Jessica Benjamin writes about two ways of failing to move from infancy to selfhood. To make this move successfully, Benjamin suggests that the child has to recognize two things; that it exists separately from its mother AND that the mother also exists in her own right, for herself.

One failure is for the child to come to recognize itself as separate, but not to simultaneously accept the "subjectivity" of the other. There is only room for one self in this world, a self which tries to dominate all the objects around it, and feels its selfhood fatally threatened by any evidence that the other has a will, is a subject, or a self, in its own right: in short a dominant or sadist.

The other failure is the opposite. The child recognizes the other as the only subject, and refuses to exist as a separate self, hanging onto the mother, expecting all care, comfort and satisfaction to continue to come from that mother. This child/adult fears that recognizing its own selfhood will destroy its safety: it is masochistic or submissive.

Although both of these positions can grip a psyche, color its reality and effect behavior, neither can exist in a pure state - except in fantasy.

As I watched Stelarc, I felt that I was implicated, as voyeur, in a colossal masochistic fantasy of this sort. At the center of the fantasy there seemed to be a fascination with lack of control. In this performance random images control Stelarc's muscle movements, in a previous performance, remote users were in control. The fantasy seems to play with the idea of a body splayed open, its musculature and nervous system hooked up to a web - a world wide web - where participants can manipulate it and watch the manipulations. Here the mother/subject is the web, and this most powerful subject has focused all its attentions onto Stelarc's body, everyone is watching him, everything is in service to him, everything is existing for him, moving for him, attuned to him.

In this performative aspect of his work, Stelarc's fantasy seems diametrically opposed to the fascist hollow body fantasy. Here the fascination is with the interior of the body as technology is hooked into it, controlling and displaying its softness, wetness, vulnerability, femininity - for at one level of signification the masochistic is always feminine. Yet the display techniques are hard and synthetic - the soft body, its muscles, its nervous system, are translated into clean, electronic impulses and digital imagery. Perhaps this apparent contradiction is simple to resolve - the dominant/submissive paradigm always comes inextricably twinned.

I left the "ParaSite" performance feeling extremely strange; disturbed by the performance and disturbed by the reception of the performance. Because, everyone was so cool about it. The performance ended and the audience clapped but I did not get the sense that they had allowed themselves to be engaged, to be moved. It was as if we'd watched an MTV spectacle that let us skate above content issues. Everybody was cool, some were mildly interested, some shrugged a little - it had been an event and the hippest people had had the closest view.

During the conference I heard Stelarc talk about his work, I and others asked him questions and later I read his writing on "ParaSite" at his website. Never once did I hear him mention any of the issues that had disturbed me, and no- one asked him about them. This denial effectively silenced and confused me - I didn't want to be the one shouting , "The Emperor's a masochist!"

In his writing Stelarc explicitly rejects any notions of setting up a slave/master dynamic and when, in his writing, he does specifically address a question about sexuality - his answer descends from the radical to the absurd.
 

Sado-masochism as defined by the contemporary S/M community can be viewed as an important practice that is fearless in the face of some of our deepest desires and fractures. Very few people get through the process of becoming a self that Jessica Benjamin describes without some vestige of the S/M structure in their psyche. I think it is an important element to recognize and work with - maybe such work will help us get a better handle on our psyches and prevent some of the routine exportation of our interior struggles and insecurities out into society - from personal terror to White terror.

Conclusion

The fantasy of a cyber body and realizations of cyber bodies seem to pull in directions that both enrich and extend, and impoverish and limit the body.

The possibility of electrical augmentation of the body and of having virtual bodies attached to our real bodies suggests the freedom to transgress the normal limits of the body; limits of time and space, of appearance and fixed gender, of a unitary self, of self and other. What limits the cyber body - and the less we acknowledge it the more it limits - is a blindness to the existing structures that exert control, and control definition, of the body; what it is, how it can be used, what gender is, what sexuality is, what acceptable sexuality is. In the words of Judith Butler, no realm of fantasy or representation is, "a domain of psychic free play."

It seems to me that opportunities for radical visions of the body are lost when for example, artists deny questions of sexuality, power and powerlessness (ParaSite) or try to ignore the problematics of gender (solve et coagula).

In his Neveryon series, Samuel Delany, manages to explicate a vision of a sado-masochistic sexuality that is radical and limit-breaking, and simultaneously to explore slavery with all its brutish limitations. He juxtaposes two poles and the structures that grow up around them - one is psychological with a sexual, role-playing practice, the other is political with a social submission and domination practice. He recognizes the play between these poles, but nevertheless convinces us that they exist at different levels and are in such different domains that an action that may appear the same - for example the wearing of a slave collar - can have a different or opposite meaning in each.

As artists continue to realize the cyber body I would be very pleased to see these realizations deal with issues of multiplicity, gender, power, flesh with some of the awareness and complexity Delany brings to S/M amd power dynamics - acknowledging and layering all of the psychological, sexual, social and political implications.

Acknowledgements

Picture 1:  ParaSite VRML image:  Gary Zebington
Picture 2:  solve et coagula installation:  AEC
Picture 3:  solve et coagula image: Stahl Stenslie
Picture 4:  ParaSite Performance at AEC: Dave Pape

References

Stelarc web site : http://www.merlin.com.au/stelarc/
solve et coagula website : http://www.gar.no/sec/

Jessica Benjamin, The bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, 1990
Samuel R. Delany, Flight from Neveryon, Bantam, 1985
J.C. Herz, Joystick Nation, Little, Brown and Co. 1997
Kathy Rae Huffman and Margarete Jahrmann "Sense-less, Bodylust in Dataspace and multiple Cyber SM," Teleopolis
Stahl Stenslie, "Body surf & Meat Sport", Teleopolis
Alluquere Roseanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press 1995
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol 1, U. of Minnesota Press, 1987