In Art 97 - Cyberculture on the Canary Islands
Pop~Event
With Orlan, Sandy Stone, Sally Jane Norman
Tenerife, The Canary Islands is a European holiday spot. In Dec 97 it was the location for IN ART 97, International Festival of Cyberculture and Electronic Art and a discussion of Digital Bodies/Virtual Identities. Gathered together in a seminar room inside a historical Castillo, a dedicated group eschewed the skin altering sun for a theoretical and technical face2face discussion on the digital boundaries of the skin.
pop~EVENT IN ART 97, Digital Bodies Virtual Identities
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In Art 97 was held in Tenerife, Puerto Santa Cruz, Canary Islands, from 9 - 12 December, 1997. Described as a symposium for "Arte Cybernetico" this meeting of curators, critics, artists and net activists took place in a familiar, darkened screening rooms in the Castillo San Felipe, a small Spanish castle-like fortress overlooking the Atlantic and the harbor of Tenerife. The setting, a European holiday resort, brings up fantasy images of discussions under palm-roofed verandas, but in reality, symposium guests found sun only during power failures, lunch breaks, and got a glimpse of the city at night when they took a group stroll to find the designated restaurant or some dance under the Vulcano.
The Spanish artist Daniel Canogar, organizer of the festival on aesthetics and culture of digital technolgy of the University of La Laguna, convened the international group with a mandate to question the body and the data_set, under the announced topic: Digital Bodies Virtual Identities. The audience, comprissed mainly of students from the University of La Laguna (a co-organizer of the symposium) was a public event. A single, crowded room of the Castillo was the location where all discussions took place, which resulted in an intense and fully focused real space, which kept everyone dutifully to the topic. Present at the meetings were a number of artistsm, critics, theoreticians and organizers who are present at nearly all high level cyber-gatherings, including Pit Schultz, Andreas Broeckmann and Gerfried Stocker.
But the conference gave the impression of a conspiracy meeting of radical female artists and net activists gathering on an to meet for discussions about the inter- and the in between island, not like Franco 40 years ago to plan a revolution ! It was a face-to-face meeting of international specialists on cybernetics and electronic culture, who --in fact-- referred to "the boths" of gender issues, and described methods to perceive the body and technology by examples and theory. This impression also was caused by the female specialists Orlan, Sandy Stone and Sally Jane Norman, giving a specific face to the conference.
The discussed problems are not just rising up problems around the ideas of the self construction of human individuality and identity, but also on the topic of data streams and data_sets which constitute con-dividuality. Terms and prefixes like post-, trans-, and cyber- have already been over-used in Internet dialogue as trophins that link familiar terms with ideologies of super-human and trans-humanism, all to often, turning cyber-identity towards horror scenarious of fascistically created images of humans changed by technology and coding. This creates a difficult vocabulary for discussing the body and virtual identity. Also, as it was stated in the discussion, the metaphor of cyborg is linked so closely to the particular mythology described by Donna Haraway. At gatherings like INART 97, new solutions could be reached by intensive communications that concentrated on these problems surrounding electronic life.
Orlan: My body is my software.
Often, when an artist offers her body to the electronic vortex, it might be shocking. This is the case of French artist Orlan, who modified her face to open up a discourse about the female self-image beyond biological and social determinism.
An impressive protagonist for the extension of the interface to "the female face", she described her work as a technological example of the use of not only science, but mythological metaphors, female ideal images, horror and imagination. She sees the results as artistic, as well as political developments. In her own words she describes herself as "..both and both --technology and art, male and female / art and non-art, in all fields." Using all media tools as well as her body as a direct interface for expression, she asks "why should the body end with the skin?" and, why should the skin end at a socially predefined face that is shaped by the male history and viewpoint?
Her prominent face evolved from the face2face effect of the interface. Orlan defined her ideal of a female image as one that was shaped by mythological images (of women) and one mixed (i.e.: by sampling). This, she says, changes the meaning of, and questions traditional imagination. She says that she never wanted to become the most beautiful woman (although it has often been written that she does) or join all the beauty marks into one face (her face). In Tenerife, she told the audience that she only wants to show that her female body --and face -- is her very own material. Using mythological symbolism (for instance "horns"), she has let herself become modelled by plastic surgeons, and during her last performances, she became simple material, as well. Her resulting face looks quite aesthetic, with this surprising mix of visual quotes. Her work is not against aesthetics but against standards.
The Spanish audience was shocked by Orlans bloody performance tapes of her surgeries, and also from her proposal --made to the press and to women in the audience-- to go as soon as possible to any surgeon and ask to have their ovaries removed. This was OrlanŽ-s solution for women, so they could finally do what they REALLY want, and not as they are preordained.
To the question about what her work has to do with new technology, and to the relationship between biotechnology and genetic manipulation, she expressed both considering her latest works on digital surgery, which will be shown on Cd-ROM installations. The link also fits to the registered living form "OncoMouse" from the Swiss company, Laroche (Donna Haraway also used this example in her reflections on technoscience in the her latest book, "Modest_Witness@Second _Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouse"
The artists and theorists at INART 97 attempted to answer the questions on the focused subject: the skin as interface and digital networks. They questioned where the border between human and machine, identity and net existed.
The theoretical investigations of Sally Jane Norman, into the relations between theatre and cyberspace, were thematic models that differentiated the machine from the body and as he called it "bodily intelligence" can be offered also to science. She showed her concept of performative art in technological environments. She speculated that performative art had always imagined virtual spaces, even in the dramas of Greek antitiquity, where mediated idea spaces were shown and used. For example, the mask was a media tool, and the Greek word for it "sona" means sounding through. In this respect, the mask was used as an amplifier for making sound more artificial. Additionally, the mask is an important image with regard to the question of interface (i.e.: in symbolic net communication, the smiley can be taken as a mask, for face2face communication).
Norman also gave examples of women working in European Space Program, by showing examples of performances which were taken as source for moving sequences in the vacuum of space. These developments evolved from performative art linked to motion capture concepts, and more importantly, were prompted by creative thinking about spaces. She referred to specific links to science, which began with a female French performance artist, Kitsu Dubais. Norman criticized the relationships between science and creative production in data space for being rarely exploited. She, herself, might inforce and encourage this in her new engagement at the German ZKM in Karlsruhe.
Esther Mera, who is originally from Spain but lives and works in Los Angeles for the past 10 years, is director of the "Hybrid and Mutants Lab" at the California Institute of the Arts. She talked on photography, digital surgery and mutations. Her interests in the body in contemporary art questions electronic masks in relation to the Hollywood industry. Since working in the L.A. post-production industry, she has began to express her artistic interests through digital technology, using the bodies and faces of Hollywood actors who are manipulated and from whom the marks of age and approaching death are eliminated. The main question is not that we believe in in the images we see (or not), it is how dense and common these images are presented and how new body images are forced upon us as an achievement to be reached. She says that it is not a question of age or gender. Women, men and children's faces must be digitally corrected in the mediated reality, this means becoming Cyborg. Ester Mera uses these images as original material for her photographs and her own artistic work, (which is not forbidden by copyright). She presents her results in an aggressively artistic way, in videotapes.
Sandy Stone referered to electronic space / data space as a room for masking trickery and camoflague, and a place where one can experiment with diverse social roles. According to Stone, the Internet is a transgendered environment that generally questions identity. Even more important, it questions what is normal, pathological, or defined as disease in society. She expressed these ideas in one of her lecture-performances, where she concludes by virtually transferring her clitoris to the palm of her hand and demonstrats how to achieve an orgasm with the help of the audience.
Her experiences as a neuroscientist informed Stone‚s concern for the relationship between the neural and the topo body (which means the relation of the brain and the personal body image we have). This, she feels, is definitly linked to individual personality. She asked the question, what is pathological and what is socially defined as illness. It is not what is real or not, she said, rather the question should be what is good for us. Sandy spoke of Personauts, entities addicted to the technological logic of a tuned technology environment. Technology --in this case-- would become an extension of the self. She discussed real, massive physical body changes, and the difficulties they present to recognize borders between socially and technogically caused circumstances and real personality shifts, which is relevant for each of us when entering dataspace.
The main issues that face data bodies also include the various identifying personal, credit, medical, & statistical profiles in the Internet and the actuality of being present in financial Intranets. It is not surprising that the question: "what is it to be human" showed up often. Besides the many cultural metaphors, the InArt97 symposium concluded with the realization that it is not only on the digitally changed and electronically influenced human body, but also the question "how" the new post-human, and trans-human being (as Andreas Broeckmann called it), shall be defined in the future.
Links:
The location, St. Cruz, Tenerife.
Orlan, dokumentationen of surgical performances.
Sally Jane Normans texts on the web:
www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic015/louvre/louvre_e.html
uchcom.botik.ru/~norman/imagina.html
Sandy Stones Homepage