Nov 5th 1997

Do Bodies Matter?

First Draft
Second Draft

Introduction

I am going to discuss 3 events that took place at the Ars Electronica Festival Sept 1997.

  1. Parasite - a performance by Australian Artist Stelarc
  2. Solve et Coagula - an installation by Norwegian artists Stahl Stenslie and Knut Mork
  3. A lecture on Intelligent Agents - by Pattie Maes ,BelgianAI/IA researcher at MIT's MediaLab.

In their work all three strain at the limitations of the human body/mind. They are interested in crossing the borders and extending the possibilities of being human, both technologically and artistically. However, they all seem to work and play with a very neutral concept of the body/mind - ignoring or minimizing the social forces that particularize bodies in terms of sex, race and class (which in turn devolves to questions of power over our bodies and minds and privileges for our bodies and minds) in a way that I find disturbingly naive.

Parasite

Description:

Muscles in both of Stelarc's arms and one leg were wired. The muscles were stimulated electronically to produce invountary movement. The stimulation was initiated by a search engine that pulled medical images and images of the body off the web - as far as I understand it pixel information was translated into Stelarc stimulation. Stelarc wore an cyborg second arm on his right side, and that was also stimulated electronically - it was not clear to me if that stimulation came from Stelarc or the web. Three or four cameras shot Stelarc, four men sat at a row of computer, audio and video controls to one side.

The performance consisted of watching Stelarc move. Video was projected on a screen behind him which mixed live shots of Stelarc, the images from the web, and vrml representations of the body using software that simulates the stimulation (these are fed back onto the web.) Stelarc told me that feedback from his body also controlled the video mixing, but since there was also a person mixing the video, it was unclear to me exactly who did what and how.

Stelarc had instructed one woman with a hand-held camera to shoot from ground level up, and move her camera a lot. Fast edits, lots of layered images, dynamic camera work, and golden lighting made the video a lot more interesting to watch then the actuality of a rather over-weight, pasty-skinned, sweating Stelarc whose movements were repetitive and rather uninteresting. Stelarc says:

So perhaps this was done on purpose.

Comments:

I find it interesting that Stelarc insists on connecting the physical body to the web. He is dismissive of seeing the internet as a "means of fulfilling outmoded metaphysical desires for disembodiment." (ParaSite Visions) Instead he constructs his own utopian fantasy of the possibilities for the body in the realm of the net.

I find several things problematic with his vision. Firstly it far outstrips the actuality of his performance - what we see is a puffy man attached to wires, moving a bit in front of an MTV-like video. Even if his body movements were controlled by remote users (something he has done in performance), the performance still resonates more as a freak show or S/M ritual than the embryonic demonstration of a new multiple body.

Nevertheless I found his performance disturbing and compelling - but I would suggest that this is precisely because it stirs up the same nexus of fears, excitements, transgressions as S/M and freak shows. I think that Stelarc's vision of being a techno- angel/interface moving on the face of the net completely ignores the issues his performance actually raise. He explicitly rejects any notion of setting up a slave/master dynamic- but when he talks of the invaded body and the body peforming involuntary movements how can this be avoided? How can we watch this performance and not be reminded of electronic torture?

Which brings us to the issue of body and privilege - If we take Stelarc's comments about his work at face value - we can only assume that because he is white, and a man, and a man from a stable democracy that he can afford to be so fearless about invasion of his body - his kind have not been taken into slavery, tortured, raped, very recently- so he is safe to play at invasion, safe to ask with some arrogance:

For some people fears about losing individuality and free will are not so metaphysical.

I am not arguing against a radical, new, multi-user body. I simply don't think that it can be envisioned unencumbered by relations of social power. For me, Stelarc's performance and vision are weakened because they do not grapple with the connotations they provoke. I would have more respect for a performance that acknowledged its kinship with other radical practises involving the body. I would like to see fantasies about a cyborg body, an absent body, a host body set in a social context which provokes questions about who has access to such fantasies, to living out such fantasies, and who may have such fantasies visited upon them.

Solve et Coagula

Description:

As the user, I stood inside the installation, was strapped into a body suit and given a head-mounted display. It seemed that looking up moved me up through the imagery and looking down moved me down. I was encouraged to make noises - and told the installation would respond. I was given two rubbery fake-fleshlike things to hold and told that squeezing them would also provoke reaction from the hard/software. The computer also controlled the activation of the body suit and could make it vibrate. Then I was ready to inteact with the installation.

Comments:

Again the claims for this piece radically outstripped my experience of it. The visuals did not make it clear that I was "inside " the cyber-beast. At times I thought that maybe it was meant to be inside me or that we were both inhabiting some kind of third space. It is described as having "multiple personality concepts." And it was explained to me that using the interfaces in different ways made the beast happy or angry - but these mood changes were not clear, let alone the sense of facing multiples personality "concepts."

The interaction that worked best for me was the audio, as it did sometimes seem that the beast was screaming back when I screamed. The experience would have been heightened if my body movements could have effected the visuals, but that was not an option. I did not get a clear sense of why or when the beast would cause my suit to vibrate - or make any real connections between the audio, visual and tactile parts of the experience.

In sum, I did not really get a sense of this creature existing at all. The feedback wasn't consistent or clear anough for me to make any real connections between my actions and its reactions. And I would have had no clue about what I was (meant to be) experiencing if I hadn't gotten hints from the museum's info-trainer.

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the installation or that I thought it was unsuccessful. It was certainly fun to be in an interactive piece with license to scream. My exhibitionist tendancies were titillated because I had an audience. It all felt good because of the vibrating suit. And I very much appreciate the attempt to create a cyber-organism.

I did wonder why the suit covered arms, legs and torso but avoided the genital area - I suppose this makes the installation less censorable and less intimidating to use. However, much of the language used to describe the potential encounter with this cyber-beast, and much of the other work by these artists explicitly references sexuality; the darker sides of desire, sado-masochism and perversion in general. But here again the installation does not live up tothe descriptions. Exotic, monstrous sexuality and "dark and unknown emotion" are conveyed much more by Stelarc's entranced masturbatory performance that by this almost Disneyesque installation.

Even if the beast was technically more convincing, I believe it would still lack the sexual and emotive power that Stenslie and Mork would like to embue 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 phatasmagorical links between parasitical 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 cyber-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 suggesting that they 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 force 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.

Intelligent Agents

Description:

Patty Maes spoke at the AEC symposium, whose general topic was "FleshFactor" and which circled around issues of the body and consciousness in the electronic age. The symposium started as a net discussion in the months before and culminated with lectures and discussions at the conference itself. Maes described her work researching software agents at MIT. These agents are meant to be a more user-friendly, sophisticated interface between people and computers, that will help with information overload and augment human beings.

These software agents are designed to have a goal, and a sense of autonomy as they pursue that goal. They are designed to learn by watching those they "work" for, discerning patterns of behavior and then offereing to automate that behavior. Some are also designed to reproduce and mimic species reproduction so those agents most successfully accomplishing their goals survive. It is envisioned that the agents would network with each other.

She described some of the agents that MediaLab's agents group are developing :

Maes envisions a future where these agents live on the net, reproducing, finding niches for themselves and generally being useful and friendly to all.

Comments:

I have not had a chance to try out any of these agents so do not know if they live up to the claims Maes makes for them. However, more information and experiences of the software can be gained from the agents group web-site.

There is something very alluring about Maes's vision for our techno-future; everyone has plenty to eat, really clean bathrooms and software agent to coddle them. But there's also something sterile and improbable about such a vision. A look at the present shows us that people have vastly unequal access to these good things. Won't her super humans - augmented by remembrance agents, fixed up by Yenta agents, supplied with crtical information by Letezias - be the very few? Guillermo Gomez Pena and Roberto Sifuentes gave a lecture at the symposium which conjured up a very different, chaotic, Neuromancer view of futurity, full of grunge, violence, humor, helplessness in the face of technology and desperate attempts to get access to that elite technology. It was as if these two vision were from different planets.

The Pena and Sifuentes world is also romanticized, but in its complexity and its recognition of conflicting motives and beliefs it seems to resemble the real world more. I rather look forward to the problems that may occur as software agents come out and operate in a world that may seek to undermine or warp them. In my Utopia the Yenta agent of an important politician, who also likes to sniff dirty underwear, may reveal all it knows, or a Remembrance Agents belonging to a politician may insidiously try to change public policy by remembering selectively.

I am also rather alarmed by the submissiveness of the Maes software agents. Compared to Stenslie's ambitions for his creature, she's making slaves - the ultimate service worker, always pleasant, always servile. Will it change human beings to have such willing and abuseable agents?

During the net part of the symposium Maes was criticised for her "positivist American" view of the benefits of technology:

And during her talk Maes addressed these criticisms. She says that she does consider social issues during software development and suggests that many of the questions about agents remain open:

Maes also suggested that the market place was the best place for the equal dissemination of this technology - as it gets cheaper and more ubiquitous, it is available to all.

Granger's fears of the military seem somewhat paranoid and Maes's answers seem reasonable. She is taking immediate social issues into consideration as they practically impinge on the scope of her work. The market place has efficiently distributed other technological marvels such as the TV, the telephone, the beeper.

Yet the future Maes moves us towards is one where it becomes eminently possible for software agents, software and hardware to take over more and more of the jobs now done by humans. At best, her agents may take over from the telephone operators who administer our electricity, gas, and credit cards accounts and deal with our complaints, so humans will not be the ones that take the friction as the wheels of consumerism turn. At worst computers will take away the badly paid service jobs, which have already replaced the better paid industrial jobs, - period.

At present most human beings only have access to money through work, and money in turn gives access to the things people need in order to live, food, shelter, beepers. The right to work is not guaranteed in most constitutions - it is simply assumed that there will always be work. I would suggest this assumption is less and less tenable.

As work becomes a privilege, Maes's squeaky clean future will have to confront the Gomez Pena/Sifuentes vision of the radically disenfranchised and marginalized - and figure out a way for people to make a living that does not depend on a job.

Conclusion

As I understand it art reflects and questions "reality" - social reality, psycological reality, physical reality. It takes things to absurd limits, it imagines the impossible, it conceptualizes the future, and it constructs truths and models of what it finds. As I understand it science does something very similar.

I find it exciting that artists and scientists are conjuring a future for the "human being" that extends us, questions the ways our minds and bodies are structured and assigned borders, and pushes at the edge of what is human. But I find it less exciting when those artists and scientists are naive about the mind and the body, do not take into account the social forces that construct our understanding of them, or the social context that determine how particular minds and bodies are expected to live.