I and I:Post-it Man
I live in a land of brief mirages.
In this land everything needs to be named, classified and attended according to my own forgetfulness.
Since I forget everything I must label everything in order to remember what it is.
Labels get worn out and sticky notes and post-its loose their glue.
Some stay in place but the sun makes the contents vanish.
As a result some are banished; people or things without a label disappear and others take the right to talk about them.
No label = NO voice.
In this land of mirages and funny mirrors those who remain are distorted, stretched or neglected.
It is romantic but I wish I could have a long strip of paper to document all I see before it disappears.
Like the romantics I would love to leave my stain of blood on the snow.
Everybody would know where to follow it
...unless I am not there when you get there.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Manhattan as a heterotopia
I was trying to think of other examples of heterotopia and the first thing I thought of was art school. Then I went to New York for a few days and decided that Manhattan is (in a sense) a heterotopia. It fits the criteria that Foucault lists.
Foucault’s sixth principle is that heterotopias have to “function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles.” I was thinking particularly of the way in which Manhattan exists physically inside America but has become symbolic of something else. From the inner depths of the continent, it is viewed as an “other” space. In the town I grew up in, Ames Iowa, New York was this place that a person could go to pursue another type of life. If one did not want to get married at a young age and raise a family, if one was slightly strange or different or exciting or weird, one could go to New York. If a person could manage to divorce his or herself from the landscape and nature so integral to Iowa, he or she could move to the city.
Foucault mentions that heterotopias “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” And that “in general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place.” I think the same could be said of Manhattan, an island city where the sheer cost of living and even visiting is enough to keep one out. I remember when I lived in New York feeling that every person in the city was fighting to stay in as the city was trying to spit him or her out.
“The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places” This is certainly true of Manhattan where one often has the feeling of walking through a gigantic shopping mall as every street is crowded with ads of utopia for sale. On the streets of New York, there is an illusion (believed by many) that happiness can be purchased. There is something distinctly unreal about Manhattan, a city that has recently begun to hide its problems dangerously well.
Heterotopias are also “linked to slices in time”, which is certainly true in Manhattan. Manhattan is a city of trends, the most modern city in the country in terms of fashion and technology, cell phones were everywhere in New York before my parents had one in Iowa. I am not sure if it is a heterotopia of illusion or of compensation, but perhaps it is both.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Optional Final Project Assignment AND Readings
Optional FINAL PROJECT ASSIGNMENT (you can choose to do this assignment, or build upon one you have started previously in the semester):
Media in Place
Use projected, transmitted, live feed, situated media to create a ritual for public space.
Ideally, you will actually do the project in the location you have selected, and the class will attend. If this is not possible, you will create a “demo” version of the project to show in class, along with a diagrammatic explanation for how the project will function in public space. Blog everything.
READING and BLOGGING
During the Thanksgiving Break, we will not have class. So we will not meet again until Dec. 2. During this two week period, please post your position papers, incorporating your responses to:
readings for 11/18 :
Foucault’s Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias. And
Ben Russell’s Headmap Manifesto
Readings for 11/25-12/2:
Interview with Janet Cardiff by Atom Egoyan, from Bomb Magazine, 2002
Another reading to be announced.
Media in Place
Use projected, transmitted, live feed, situated media to create a ritual for public space.
Ideally, you will actually do the project in the location you have selected, and the class will attend. If this is not possible, you will create a “demo” version of the project to show in class, along with a diagrammatic explanation for how the project will function in public space. Blog everything.
READING and BLOGGING
During the Thanksgiving Break, we will not have class. So we will not meet again until Dec. 2. During this two week period, please post your position papers, incorporating your responses to:
readings for 11/18 :
Foucault’s Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias. And
Ben Russell’s Headmap Manifesto
Readings for 11/25-12/2:
Interview with Janet Cardiff by Atom Egoyan, from Bomb Magazine, 2002
Another reading to be announced.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sexo Idiota Booth
antecedent
this is my previous experience on the building of a poetic text using interview like fragments for a final montage. This piece was called babylon and is centered only in the sound of different languages.
This is also a sign of how the project will look.
THE PROJECT
This project will be performed during the Sexo Idiota poetic recital in the Book Fair in Quito. It will happen on the 28th of November from 16:30 to 18:00. We will have some kind of sex-booth like the ones found in Times Square. People that attend the recital will be able to pay one dollar to get a poem of theirs filmed in a Bolex shot. Which means 24 seconds. The poems will be part of the mockumentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad, a film that will try to prove that there is no space for poets in today’s cities in general, but in Quito in particular. The people will be asked to give permission for using their poems in the film in the same way that Warner Bros. Studios was "notifying" the people walking in front of the MET museum in NY on monday the 13th of November of this year, that if they "were there" they were automatically granting permission for Warner Bros to have them in the "program pilot" they were shooting.
What the project dwells on is the idea of creating from the space that is given to one. There is this psychological theory that says that people are not inherently "good" or "bad" but that it is the "system" that shapes their behavior. From what I understand it has to do with behaviorism but revised. Behaviorism is sometimes considered harmful. The person that explained this theory to me, a psychology grad student said that this theory was developed as the digital revolution was happening, the silicon valley, the internet boom. The question that we want to arise is how to own our homes again, our cities, the cities we live in. It is a matter of property, it is a matter of class, it is a matter of education, it is something that is happening now and that is affecting a big part of the population.
Finding a spot in the city when one can “be heard” (be filmed) expressing oneself in such a free a powerful way as poetry will hopefully produce a catharsis in the citizen. Nonetheless, It is important to mention that the booth is modeled after the sex booths in which people can watch pornography (if you may, express oneself in such a powerful way as masturbating, would be the equivalent) which implies a certain mood to it that we will try to attain by: a curtain, the fact that the filmmaker who is shooting will be dressed as a male pornstar of the seventies, money being part of the citizen’s right idea (the more money you have the more you can express yourself) and the time constrain (24 seconds)
A nasty curtain
B male pornstar
C money
D time
The Sexo Idiota booth deals with the idea of the possibility of a public intimacy, which also links this project to the dynamics of today’s social networks as means of making business as well as spaces one can use (when actually one has no space in the real city).
filming the context-the city
The sexo idiota booth will be first installed in Quito. We will present this project, the 24 24-second films it will produce, as part of the documentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad. It is key for the project then to be able to establish a point of view of the city from the perspective of the poets, the artists. For this matter there will be two strategies to make the city part of the film.
a) We will follow 3 artists in Quito, filming each one of them in a 100 feet roll of film.
b) To shape Quito we will do the same process with 3 artists in NY, taking New York as the "model" for what a cultural city is expected to be.
Quito
We will divide the city in North, Center and South. Following one artist of each area.
The North: The project of mapping la delicia "new ways en la delicia" will be used as a scouting guide for the north part shooting. The artist to follow will be Jorge Gomez, one of the poets from the collective Sexo Idiota.
>I decided not to film¨"la delicia" as I had already made such map and document with the places I wanted to remember. Instead I decided to shoot a scene with Jorge Gómez and include Diego Ortuño, both being poets of the poetic colective¨"sexo idiota".
The Center We will follow Juan Carlos Donoso, or let him guide us through the center part of the city. He is an upcoming filmmaker that has worked with the spaces of his area in a critical way.
>Instead of following Juan Carlos I ended up articulating a proposal (filming) of his to document a avenue called "10 de Agosto", which is the main artery of the city. He shot a videoclip of one of the songs of my band "queen size bed" using us as a pretext to put the camera on the obscured buildings and businesses of this used-to-be-prosperous place. We were almost badly mugged.
The South For this area we will follow Susana with who I periodically shoot "domingos con susana" a photographic project of a portrait of the south. She will be the one handling the film camera and choosing the places to photograph (in film) as I drive.
>here some pictures of our sunday (there is the film coming up):
NY
The shooting of NY has already started as one weekend in October and a weekend in November have already been shot. This coming weekend of November and last one will also be shot.
The Characters we are following are:
a) Andres Noboa, a musician that lives in Queens and that is going to grad school with who we made this piece while shooting him.
-Last weekend we shot the final scene of the NY part in the Chelsea Hotel.
b) Maria Jose Viteri, an actress that lives in Brooklyn that is also going to grad school.
c) We will try to follow Danielle Bernstein, a documentary filmmaker that has worked in Ecuador and Gabriel Roldos, an organizer, a relational artist.
this is a call for poems i did. i have to make a new one now because there are new conditions in terms of dates. but i wanted to share the process.
this is the new one
LIST
so far by talking to people
we have appointed new facts for the project
1) the filmmaker that is inside the booth filming the people reading the 24 second poems after paying one dollar should resemble a male porn star of the seventies
2) it is really important that there is a curtain, in that it resembles the nastiness of the shower curtain
3) the idea we are working on is the possibility of public intimacy
4) the idea of making money part of the process adds to the nastiness feeling of attending a real sex booth
5) we are getting ourselves into somewhat of a greater poem dynamic as if it were an exquisit corpse exercise
6) we are still wondering how to make this poems fit the title of the documentary: Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad
7) the customers should be required to get a formal jacket on to resemble some of the customers of the real booths.
this is my previous experience on the building of a poetic text using interview like fragments for a final montage. This piece was called babylon and is centered only in the sound of different languages.
This is also a sign of how the project will look.
THE PROJECT
This project will be performed during the Sexo Idiota poetic recital in the Book Fair in Quito. It will happen on the 28th of November from 16:30 to 18:00. We will have some kind of sex-booth like the ones found in Times Square. People that attend the recital will be able to pay one dollar to get a poem of theirs filmed in a Bolex shot. Which means 24 seconds. The poems will be part of the mockumentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad, a film that will try to prove that there is no space for poets in today’s cities in general, but in Quito in particular. The people will be asked to give permission for using their poems in the film in the same way that Warner Bros. Studios was "notifying" the people walking in front of the MET museum in NY on monday the 13th of November of this year, that if they "were there" they were automatically granting permission for Warner Bros to have them in the "program pilot" they were shooting.
What the project dwells on is the idea of creating from the space that is given to one. There is this psychological theory that says that people are not inherently "good" or "bad" but that it is the "system" that shapes their behavior. From what I understand it has to do with behaviorism but revised. Behaviorism is sometimes considered harmful. The person that explained this theory to me, a psychology grad student said that this theory was developed as the digital revolution was happening, the silicon valley, the internet boom. The question that we want to arise is how to own our homes again, our cities, the cities we live in. It is a matter of property, it is a matter of class, it is a matter of education, it is something that is happening now and that is affecting a big part of the population.
Finding a spot in the city when one can “be heard” (be filmed) expressing oneself in such a free a powerful way as poetry will hopefully produce a catharsis in the citizen. Nonetheless, It is important to mention that the booth is modeled after the sex booths in which people can watch pornography (if you may, express oneself in such a powerful way as masturbating, would be the equivalent) which implies a certain mood to it that we will try to attain by: a curtain, the fact that the filmmaker who is shooting will be dressed as a male pornstar of the seventies, money being part of the citizen’s right idea (the more money you have the more you can express yourself) and the time constrain (24 seconds)
A nasty curtain
B male pornstar
C money
D time
The Sexo Idiota booth deals with the idea of the possibility of a public intimacy, which also links this project to the dynamics of today’s social networks as means of making business as well as spaces one can use (when actually one has no space in the real city).
filming the context-the city
The sexo idiota booth will be first installed in Quito. We will present this project, the 24 24-second films it will produce, as part of the documentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad. It is key for the project then to be able to establish a point of view of the city from the perspective of the poets, the artists. For this matter there will be two strategies to make the city part of the film.
a) We will follow 3 artists in Quito, filming each one of them in a 100 feet roll of film.
b) To shape Quito we will do the same process with 3 artists in NY, taking New York as the "model" for what a cultural city is expected to be.
Quito
We will divide the city in North, Center and South. Following one artist of each area.
The North: The project of mapping la delicia "new ways en la delicia" will be used as a scouting guide for the north part shooting. The artist to follow will be Jorge Gomez, one of the poets from the collective Sexo Idiota.
>I decided not to film¨"la delicia" as I had already made such map and document with the places I wanted to remember. Instead I decided to shoot a scene with Jorge Gómez and include Diego Ortuño, both being poets of the poetic colective¨"sexo idiota".
The Center We will follow Juan Carlos Donoso, or let him guide us through the center part of the city. He is an upcoming filmmaker that has worked with the spaces of his area in a critical way.
>Instead of following Juan Carlos I ended up articulating a proposal (filming) of his to document a avenue called "10 de Agosto", which is the main artery of the city. He shot a videoclip of one of the songs of my band "queen size bed" using us as a pretext to put the camera on the obscured buildings and businesses of this used-to-be-prosperous place. We were almost badly mugged.
The South For this area we will follow Susana with who I periodically shoot "domingos con susana" a photographic project of a portrait of the south. She will be the one handling the film camera and choosing the places to photograph (in film) as I drive.
>here some pictures of our sunday (there is the film coming up):
NY
The shooting of NY has already started as one weekend in October and a weekend in November have already been shot. This coming weekend of November and last one will also be shot.
The Characters we are following are:
a) Andres Noboa, a musician that lives in Queens and that is going to grad school with who we made this piece while shooting him.
-Last weekend we shot the final scene of the NY part in the Chelsea Hotel.
b) Maria Jose Viteri, an actress that lives in Brooklyn that is also going to grad school.
c) We will try to follow Danielle Bernstein, a documentary filmmaker that has worked in Ecuador and Gabriel Roldos, an organizer, a relational artist.
this is a call for poems i did. i have to make a new one now because there are new conditions in terms of dates. but i wanted to share the process.
this is the new one
LIST
so far by talking to people
we have appointed new facts for the project
1) the filmmaker that is inside the booth filming the people reading the 24 second poems after paying one dollar should resemble a male porn star of the seventies
2) it is really important that there is a curtain, in that it resembles the nastiness of the shower curtain
3) the idea we are working on is the possibility of public intimacy
4) the idea of making money part of the process adds to the nastiness feeling of attending a real sex booth
5) we are getting ourselves into somewhat of a greater poem dynamic as if it were an exquisit corpse exercise
6) we are still wondering how to make this poems fit the title of the documentary: Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad
7) the customers should be required to get a formal jacket on to resemble some of the customers of the real booths.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
the morality of cleanliness
I
rad nationalistic kids
shit
mexican
pride
II
scarlet colored cheeks
on red colored roses
III
elemento
latino
spit
despojo
semi-erotic
love
for workers
Truly Gómez + mtap
11/11/09
rad nationalistic kids
shit
mexican
pride
II
scarlet colored cheeks
on red colored roses
III
elemento
latino
spit
despojo
semi-erotic
love
for workers
Truly Gómez + mtap
11/11/09
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Reading for Nov. 18
Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias by Michel Foucault
Headmap Manifesto, by Ben Russell
As you read, please think about possibilities for mediated interventions in public spaces.
Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias by Michel Foucault
Headmap Manifesto, by Ben Russell
As you read, please think about possibilities for mediated interventions in public spaces.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
poem for the performance
hi
i am going to shoot myself with my cellphone
reading a poem about the workers bodies
i am going to do so after washing my mouth
i would like to know if you would like to contribute to this open poem
with a sentence
it can be in any language, but you have to write how it should be pronounced (doris, amarien specially)
the poem:
"el cuerpo de los trabajadores/the workers bodies"
red colored cheeks
red colored rush
red colored iron
ironing
sweet mermelade casquets
great american/british/german/spanish pride
blue colored chips
red national kids
mexican
shit
mexican
piece
sour chili gone bad
spanish speaking/cuban/colombian/ecuadorian pride
elemento latino
coronel
despojo
piel
Truly Gómez (my image de corps)
11/10/09
i am going to shoot myself with my cellphone
reading a poem about the workers bodies
i am going to do so after washing my mouth
i would like to know if you would like to contribute to this open poem
with a sentence
it can be in any language, but you have to write how it should be pronounced (doris, amarien specially)
the poem:
"el cuerpo de los trabajadores/the workers bodies"
red colored cheeks
red colored rush
red colored iron
ironing
sweet mermelade casquets
great american/british/german/spanish pride
blue colored chips
red national kids
mexican
shit
mexican
piece
sour chili gone bad
spanish speaking/cuban/colombian/ecuadorian pride
elemento latino
coronel
despojo
piel
Truly Gómez (my image de corps)
11/10/09
Monday, November 9, 2009
pull ups (pending written response to last week readings+thoughts on the body)
"I know how it is where you come from
you might have been brought up where bad things happen
when we find something like this (unas barras)
we feel it is paradise
see
all these things are taken away from us
so
if we want to get what you can get out of them
we have to use
our imagination
if you want to go rob
or shoot people
you can do it
but if you want to get a better life
you go out to the world and do what you got to do
do what you got to do
when you go back to Ecuador
you are going to get all the girls go crazy
touch you
say thing like
uh
you got bigger
i know you can judge one from the cover
see the scar in my face
i might have gone through some stuff
do you have a friend that can give you do some pull ups?
you want the model body type
I know what you want
and see
you are thin
that is good
you just need to work
every day
little by little
you might see some guys that are doing it by themselves
you might try
and say
i can't get none done
but they have just been doing it
when you go back to Ecuador
you can get the Ecuadorian ladies
you are not going to stay here are you?
you are going back aren't you?
are you here here?
you have to take advantage of everything that is open to you
the pool
the gym
some other guys might not be friendly and talk to you
but you can see what they do
and try it yourself
you work every day
five days a week
or three days
if you see it hurts
monday wednesday friday
see?
I am trying to loose some weight
I am two hundred and fifty now
you can just start working
I run, I do push ups, pull ups, sit ups
that is all you need
you see those guys that lift weights?
when you stop doing that you get fat
see
I know where you come from there is nothing like that
you don't judge a book by its cover
I could have judge you
and said
M13
but I didn't
you see the scar in my face?
you could have said I'm a bad guy
see how I pull
you need to get some gloves to improve your grip
feel it
I can help you
try
come one
I can help you
pull
see?
I let you pull
you just have to tell your friend to help you but to let you still pull
it is just through the bump that you need help
these help you form this muscles
this
on your back
I read
I never got into professional boxing
amateur
I ripped my Achilles tendon
I work
I own three properties
I am 25
I work out 5 days a week
I don't smoke
don't drink
Once you star working your body you don't want to poison it
you are fit
you are thin
you are going to pull in the stomach
get some chest frame
shoulders
back
you just want to fit your clothes
friday night you can go out
work out
freshen up
take a shower
get your clothes on
and
go out
a little social drinking it is ok
I am not going to run my extra miles now
because I have been here talking to you
but that is ok
I help you
I taught you something
Good Luck"
Truly Gomez
transcribed conversation
11/09/09
you might have been brought up where bad things happen
when we find something like this (unas barras)
we feel it is paradise
see
all these things are taken away from us
so
if we want to get what you can get out of them
we have to use
our imagination
if you want to go rob
or shoot people
you can do it
but if you want to get a better life
you go out to the world and do what you got to do
do what you got to do
when you go back to Ecuador
you are going to get all the girls go crazy
touch you
say thing like
uh
you got bigger
i know you can judge one from the cover
see the scar in my face
i might have gone through some stuff
do you have a friend that can give you do some pull ups?
you want the model body type
I know what you want
and see
you are thin
that is good
you just need to work
every day
little by little
you might see some guys that are doing it by themselves
you might try
and say
i can't get none done
but they have just been doing it
when you go back to Ecuador
you can get the Ecuadorian ladies
you are not going to stay here are you?
you are going back aren't you?
are you here here?
you have to take advantage of everything that is open to you
the pool
the gym
some other guys might not be friendly and talk to you
but you can see what they do
and try it yourself
you work every day
five days a week
or three days
if you see it hurts
monday wednesday friday
see?
I am trying to loose some weight
I am two hundred and fifty now
you can just start working
I run, I do push ups, pull ups, sit ups
that is all you need
you see those guys that lift weights?
when you stop doing that you get fat
see
I know where you come from there is nothing like that
you don't judge a book by its cover
I could have judge you
and said
M13
but I didn't
you see the scar in my face?
you could have said I'm a bad guy
see how I pull
you need to get some gloves to improve your grip
feel it
I can help you
try
come one
I can help you
pull
see?
I let you pull
you just have to tell your friend to help you but to let you still pull
it is just through the bump that you need help
these help you form this muscles
this
on your back
I read
I never got into professional boxing
amateur
I ripped my Achilles tendon
I work
I own three properties
I am 25
I work out 5 days a week
I don't smoke
don't drink
Once you star working your body you don't want to poison it
you are fit
you are thin
you are going to pull in the stomach
get some chest frame
shoulders
back
you just want to fit your clothes
friday night you can go out
work out
freshen up
take a shower
get your clothes on
and
go out
a little social drinking it is ok
I am not going to run my extra miles now
because I have been here talking to you
but that is ok
I help you
I taught you something
Good Luck"
Truly Gomez
transcribed conversation
11/09/09
an updated version of the rod coover google map
la delicia
View new ways en la delicia in a larger map
for a stange reason you have to zoom in or zoom out until you can make sense of the image
;)
View new ways en la delicia in a larger map
for a stange reason you have to zoom in or zoom out until you can make sense of the image
;)
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Body Language
In 2004, Physical theatre, DV8, made a film based on their one stage production named “the cost of living.” When I was reading about holism and fragmentation of body, subjectivity and objectivity, I couldn’t help think about some moments in this film.
If A body is a intermediary in-between the subject and the world, the legless dancer saw himself as a holistic existence through his mirror of unconsciousness. But the world he perceived (or we perceived) reflects merely a fragmentation of his body. As Merleau-Ponty said, the dancer linked his subjectivity and the objects of the world by weaving them into his flesh.
There is another more interesting phenomenon. If we agree Heidegger’s linguistic theory: Language is the house of being, then how about body language? For me, I firmly believe that the dancer spoke to others through his physical movement. Which means he dwells in his own thoughts of the body, the interface he communicated to other beings through. Moreover, it may across the boundary Heidegger set for differentiating human beings and nonhuman animals. It is not only about dance, we could even see the dancer standing out side of his embodiment of body image and transforming into his own essence.
Wegenstein writes on page 32 that, "The medium that signifies the body, its representation, no longer is any different from the 'raw material' of the body itself. Without mediation the body is nothing." This relationship of the representation to the raw material of the body is crucial to our bodies' relationship to technology. Much like Lacan's idea of the infant staring into the mirror to find a body-in-pieces, only to form a mental misrecognition of its body based on this, the pervasiveness of internet-based identities in society fuels this acceptance of misrecognition through fragmentation. The internet provides us with a medium to willingly fragment ourselves, disperse our bodies and our identities into many little fragments which are spread amongst the myriad of ways to represent oneself online: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, on and on. Increasingly, this seems to be the definition of presence that people accept for themselves and others. "The recognition of one's self in a deceptive image that is framed by somebody else's gaze, a mirror, a screen" helps form this experienced embodiment. We encourage this deceptiveness through the distance of the stranger's gaze upon the screen into our embodiment. When these fragments are projected back onto ourselves by the outside world, into some new composite that doesn't seem to be what the body is in real life, we begin to accept this as our embodiment. This representation of the body seems very distant from the raw material of the body itself.
I have a great deal of trouble writing about psychoanalysis, because so much of it to me seems as though it were made up in a dream, placed on top of reality. Sexism is such an integral part of Freud's theories that I have trouble dissecting parts that can hold up without it. That said, one fragment that was interesting to me in the Wegenstein involves the alienation that occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror in a photo framed by someone else’s gaze. This seems to me an accurate perception of a kind of alienation and projection onto the body that is particularly prevalent in mass media. This could relate quite easily to Jack Berger’s theories in his book Ways of Seeing, in which self satisfaction is stolen from oneself through the image of the body with a piece of merchandise and offered back for the price of the item for sale. The Persona also deals with the way in which we project onto the body or onto an actor while watching a film.
L'image du corps
At the basis of Bernadette Wegenstein's conception, is the idea of the body as mediation. A body that is both aware of its own characteristics/shape/image, and of its being 'focusing screen' of the world. Both conditions, though, require the idea of a lived body, a dynamic structure we actually inhabit like a world. A world that is also the idea of our world as perceived by somebody's screen/gaze.
But if certainly mediation is done through an Outside-in/Inside-out structure, it is as well a random oscillation between a unifying, holistic perspective and a shattered, focused and fragmented idea of the body.
How this duality affects image-making? What's the tension within the realm of holistic/fragmented imagemaking? Is it also an analog vs digital tension?
In a medium such as film, images just appear. Light impresses, and processing makes bodies emerge from film. Is it a whole? Can we dismantle and find coherent units in it? It's hard to do, because the film is impressed by bodies that never get close. Once we try to focus, separate, enlarge, the body just fades, becomes unintelligible. We cannot physically go beyond it and see/experience a world that lies behind it, because it's just there, final.
The zoom of the material analysis doesn't show us a body behind the body. It just blurs the analog body, while shatters the digital one.
If we go deep into the digital body, we found it sliced under a grid, and every portion carries its own value, and potential.
This potential is the idea of reconstructing a whole through the harmony of an ensemble, the single parts. Every pixel is just a value, into a bigger array/system/choir.
In this sense, digital body goes beyond and perhaps is more surprising than analog body; it appears, too but it's a synthesis, a real choir, in which we have the chance of distinguish each voice. Its embodiment is then a manifestation. As the analog body, it talks to the world and through it, it carries preconceived meanings and determined values, but without actually being there.
Should these considerations affect the way we use a certain idea of body (analog/digital), and make aesthetic decisions?
A tangent, extemporary, example/consideration (still trying to know why it came in to my mind, probably because winter's approaching...): could now the good old Hilltop commercial be considered a conceptual hybridation between digital (everyone singing with his/her/its own value) and analog?
But if certainly mediation is done through an Outside-in/Inside-out structure, it is as well a random oscillation between a unifying, holistic perspective and a shattered, focused and fragmented idea of the body.
How this duality affects image-making? What's the tension within the realm of holistic/fragmented imagemaking? Is it also an analog vs digital tension?
In a medium such as film, images just appear. Light impresses, and processing makes bodies emerge from film. Is it a whole? Can we dismantle and find coherent units in it? It's hard to do, because the film is impressed by bodies that never get close. Once we try to focus, separate, enlarge, the body just fades, becomes unintelligible. We cannot physically go beyond it and see/experience a world that lies behind it, because it's just there, final.
The zoom of the material analysis doesn't show us a body behind the body. It just blurs the analog body, while shatters the digital one.
If we go deep into the digital body, we found it sliced under a grid, and every portion carries its own value, and potential.
This potential is the idea of reconstructing a whole through the harmony of an ensemble, the single parts. Every pixel is just a value, into a bigger array/system/choir.
In this sense, digital body goes beyond and perhaps is more surprising than analog body; it appears, too but it's a synthesis, a real choir, in which we have the chance of distinguish each voice. Its embodiment is then a manifestation. As the analog body, it talks to the world and through it, it carries preconceived meanings and determined values, but without actually being there.
Should these considerations affect the way we use a certain idea of body (analog/digital), and make aesthetic decisions?
A tangent, extemporary, example/consideration (still trying to know why it came in to my mind, probably because winter's approaching...): could now the good old Hilltop commercial be considered a conceptual hybridation between digital (everyone singing with his/her/its own value) and analog?
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Holistic and fragmented bodies
Throughout history, Wegenstein argues, the perception of the body has evolved and changed - passing from a fragmented, detached perspective to one of "holism," considering the body as a single system. From the pre-modern to the modern eras, these perceptions passed through numerous different stages. For example, psychoanalysis viewed disorders of the body as a resulting from a lack of a "unified" body image (anorexia, for example, derives from a "mourning for a pre-Oedpial body," i.e. a younger, sexless self). As the perception of the body moved toward a more holistic state, it became increasingly clear (in Wegenstein's terms) that the body functioned as a mediating agent, the site at which the individual (constantly and necessarily) comes into contact with his or her surroundings. From a phenomenological perspective, this is how the "body extends into the world" - through the sensory apparatus (as media artists, we must ask, how does this "extension" process work in the other way - the world mediating the body?).
The current postmodern era is one of fluid, customizable bodies. This can happen in the virtual (online personas, Photoshopped celebrities, etc.) or physical (plastic surgery, etc.) realms; even though it is clear that these changes break the unity of the body (and are often patently false), they have become socially accepted, standard practices. What does this say for the concept of "holism"? Are we moving away from holism yet again - a concept Wegenstein ties to the rise of technologies intimately associated with or merged into the body (as we discussed in class last week, our cell phones can be deeply personal items that also "extend" us into the world). Is the extension of the body into the world - pushed forth by technological advancements - necessarily a process of continuing fragmentation?
The current postmodern era is one of fluid, customizable bodies. This can happen in the virtual (online personas, Photoshopped celebrities, etc.) or physical (plastic surgery, etc.) realms; even though it is clear that these changes break the unity of the body (and are often patently false), they have become socially accepted, standard practices. What does this say for the concept of "holism"? Are we moving away from holism yet again - a concept Wegenstein ties to the rise of technologies intimately associated with or merged into the body (as we discussed in class last week, our cell phones can be deeply personal items that also "extend" us into the world). Is the extension of the body into the world - pushed forth by technological advancements - necessarily a process of continuing fragmentation?
The Body and Being: A Response to Reading 'Getting Under the Skin' by Bernadette Wegenstein
The starting point for Bernadette Weigenstien’s ‘Getting Under the Skin’ was her research into the representation of AIDS in European media. In this interface between the body, medical technology and media technology, the body opens up as site for meaning making not in a way that it stands for ‘meaning’ but rather in a way that it ‘become’ it. Her research gave way to study body discourse with an awareness that it had ‘literally and obviously gotten under the surface of the skin’.
‘Making Room for the Body’ introduces body criticism through some of the key concepts that emerged in movement from modernity to high modernity and the concurrent ideas that emerged in the fields of cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, feminist theory media and medical technologies. Central to this was how the body became an object of anatomical practices during early modernity. Contemporary medical technologies of imaging that specifically ‘intervene’ into the female body; new reproductive technologies and the ultrasounds; provide a whole new way to imagine the body as a mediated space that opens up through skin, orifices, incisions, nips, cuts and tuck. Meaning making in that sense cannot be a process of situating the body within these processes but rather in the moment of the body’s embodying of processes, time, technologies and the world.
Holism, an interrelation of all body parts-in- pieces as defined by Wegenstein, incorporates the discourse of fragmentation initiated during early modernity. It becomes a celebratory moment in terms of the practices that define the body and its being-ness. It is moving beyond fragmentation and articulating the body as a space with no end. The skin becomes the vulnerable, fragile boundary between the inside and the outside; a surface that is intravenous and can be mediated upon.
In his suggestion of Philosophy being an interpretation of illness, Wegenstein suggests Nietzsche as one of the forerunners of the holistic body concepts. As Blondel suggests, images are metaphors of the body for Nietzsche. Philology, the act of interpretation can be the only way of attaching meaning to the body. The body is priori because “ there is no order or relation or text’ prior to it. It becomes as Blondel suggests the intermediary space between the absolute plural of the world’s chaos and the absolute simplification of the intellect. The body becomes a metaphor for an interpretative space within which the actual creation of meaning is an act of the will to power.
The idea of the body as an interpretative space is further developed through Psychoanalysis that looks at the body as a psychological entity. The idea of auto-perception –the image of the body produced by the body itself, the perception of the world through one’s own skin-moi-peau. This also brings forth one of the most fundamental ways of understanding subjectivities in the 20th century: the idea of representation as a construction that depends on how the body/self is apprehended in its social relations, an image that is created by the subject’s perception of the outer world and the world’s perception of it. Basing his theory on Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that the only way we can perceive our bodily selves is through a deceptive image that is somebody’s gaze. The frame, the screen, the interface or mirror becomes ways of intervening in the construction of that deceptive image.
The stable concept of the body is replaces by what Lacan calls the fractal body, one that is dispersed and whose identity depends on the process of inscription and semanticization through the outer world. This fractal body, not aware of the images that it is producing becomes one of the key ways of repositioning subjectivities in the 20th century. Freud talks about the body ego as a border surface, a skin sack or skin fold. As post Lacan psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu suggests that the skin is more like an interface between me and the other, something that envelopes the ego and divides the self from the other.
An engagement with the idea of fragility of the skin, notions of disease and illness become metaphors through which the boundary between the inside and the outside becomes significantly de-stabilized. The idea of placing the body at the center of the experiential world as a way of experiencing it was prompted by Bergson who proposed that the body image has two interrelated sides- L’image du corps is a way in which the subject perceives his or her own body; the image one has of oneself is therefore the center of ones being and perception, an interface to the world. The second is L’image de corps indicates the body itself as a perceptive apparatus through which the world is being processed. This implies the body the body as simultaneously a mirror or screen for the images from the outside and the perceptive center thorough which the world is to be experienced. This proposes the thinking of consciousness only in terms of embodiment.
The phenomenological approach to the body always proposes the consciousness as consciousness of something. Reality then has no independent status but it exists only as an intentionality or intentional appearance. In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the body becomes inseparable from the worlds it inhabits. The ‘pragmatic turn’ proposes the body’s presence as impossible without embodiment. Geil Weiss signals a departure in her analysis of the body image leading her to develop her theory of embodiment as incorporeality. She suggests that the experience of being embodied is never a private experience. It is always mediated through processes of interaction with the human and non human bodies in the world outside.
A phenomenological approach of the body most interestingly for me, proposes the body as a site of inscription and semanticization. It becomes a way of being in its own and being in the world with both experiences constantly blurred. Also, the body becomes something more than its physicality-it is something that can be performed. Performativity in itself becoming the means to address the struggle between holism and fragmentation. The idea brings a whole new meaning to transitional, migrational and marginalized identities much in the way we begin to understand gender as a construct and drag as a performative subversion of notions around biological determinism. The opening up of the body and its interface with meditative technology proposes the scattering and dispersion of the body in multiple ways and forms; much like the proliferation of meditative technologies themselves. Opening up that space could lead to all new utterances of the body and the many ways in which it breathes, sighs, gestures and lives on.
One does not HAVE a body but rather IS a body
Performative embodiments and corporealities
The notion of the body as either an interface through which we perceive the world, or a mirror/producer of perceptions are definitely interrelated. It would be very difficult to prove it philosophically but we can prove it phenomenologically, that is, by observing the use/notion of the body occurring in contemporary daily life and art.
Why is this easier to observe this way? Because when we study these manifestations we actually receive a mediated body and it is that mediation which reveals the notion of body that is being addressed.
The defense mechanisms established through mediation allow us to perceive the body as cleansed and infinite. It is possible to understand the body better through mediation thanks of this notion of augmented or hyperbolic reality. In that sense it constitutes an hermeneutic exercise: it consists of putting the images of reality in front of the viewer and carefully going through its description to -through the careful description- see what remained vague or blurred.
A dermatological idea, that of the skin as "ultimate frontier", might prove very efficient in encapsulating the perceptive elements of the being such as: mind, heart, spirit (differentiated from soul), body and soul. Ultimately it will be these elements who are responsible for creativity, and in such sense establishing a difference between the body as interface or the body as mirror/antenna might prove efficient for philosophy for the purpose of categorizing cognitive processes; but our reality proves that the ways in which we embody the world do not differ much from the ways in which the body embodies our collective experience.
It makes us all responsible and capable of realizing that what we see in the world is there because the human body has produced it. Mediations, like glasses, allow us to see this better.
Watch: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes – Mirror (2006, 6:09) and also his amazing Mirror Series
The notion of the body as either an interface through which we perceive the world, or a mirror/producer of perceptions are definitely interrelated. It would be very difficult to prove it philosophically but we can prove it phenomenologically, that is, by observing the use/notion of the body occurring in contemporary daily life and art.
Why is this easier to observe this way? Because when we study these manifestations we actually receive a mediated body and it is that mediation which reveals the notion of body that is being addressed.
The defense mechanisms established through mediation allow us to perceive the body as cleansed and infinite. It is possible to understand the body better through mediation thanks of this notion of augmented or hyperbolic reality. In that sense it constitutes an hermeneutic exercise: it consists of putting the images of reality in front of the viewer and carefully going through its description to -through the careful description- see what remained vague or blurred.
A dermatological idea, that of the skin as "ultimate frontier", might prove very efficient in encapsulating the perceptive elements of the being such as: mind, heart, spirit (differentiated from soul), body and soul. Ultimately it will be these elements who are responsible for creativity, and in such sense establishing a difference between the body as interface or the body as mirror/antenna might prove efficient for philosophy for the purpose of categorizing cognitive processes; but our reality proves that the ways in which we embody the world do not differ much from the ways in which the body embodies our collective experience.
It makes us all responsible and capable of realizing that what we see in the world is there because the human body has produced it. Mediations, like glasses, allow us to see this better.
Watch: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes – Mirror (2006, 6:09) and also his amazing Mirror Series
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Assignment for the 5th Project:
Project #5
The Body As Interface
Working with Bergson’s ideas of “l’image du corps” and “l’image de corps”, your second project will work with these two different ideas of the the relationship between the body and the image: 1) in l’image du corps, the body organizes the self as a kind of interface to the world; and 2) in l’image de corps, the body is the perceptive center, the locus where the world is perceived, and where images of the world are formed.
Please plan a simple performance that builds on the relationship between a body (yours or someone else’s) and a media image (an on-screen image or a projection). Choose to work with either the “l’image du corps” or “l’image de corps”—please be very clear which one you are working with.
1)how does your installation/performance frame the body as a Bergsonian “interface”
a) how is the body “produced by” the media image?
Or
b) how does the body “produce” the media image?
Project #5
The Body As Interface
Working with Bergson’s ideas of “l’image du corps” and “l’image de corps”, your second project will work with these two different ideas of the the relationship between the body and the image: 1) in l’image du corps, the body organizes the self as a kind of interface to the world; and 2) in l’image de corps, the body is the perceptive center, the locus where the world is perceived, and where images of the world are formed.
Please plan a simple performance that builds on the relationship between a body (yours or someone else’s) and a media image (an on-screen image or a projection). Choose to work with either the “l’image du corps” or “l’image de corps”—please be very clear which one you are working with.
1)how does your installation/performance frame the body as a Bergsonian “interface”
a) how is the body “produced by” the media image?
Or
b) how does the body “produce” the media image?
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