Monday, December 16, 2013

Realtionship of Humanity and Technology in Performances of the 20th Century



Since the beginning of the 20th century, some artists included technology in their performances and raised questions about the relationship of humanity with the new advancements. Some of the artist’s performances consisted on providing some points of view about the constructed social definitions that shape our lives. Some others questioned if mores and values were beneficial for mankind evolution, or on the contrary, humans ended up acting as programmed beings.
Artists like Marinetti wrote his visions of the future and shared them with the world in a manifesto. Some other artists like Samuel Beckett, wrote stories concerned with how the natural state of man could be, versus a man living in society. Also, plays like “Krapp’s last tape” examines the changes that individuals experience through the pass of time in life. Performances by artist like Laurie Anderson, the Wooster Group, and Guillermo Gomez Peña, measure the shifts and transformations of society in the contemporary world, but identify some new challenges that individuals confront nowadays. They explain that the virtualspace is a new place of interaction where information flows and where our minds are connected to a network of instant communication. However, lack of human contact and face to face interaction could affect our personal and emotional development. In addition, artists like Eduardo Cak, Orlan, and Stelarc experiment with technology, medical procedures and scientific knowledge to reveal their viewpoints related to human identity.  
Nevertheless, the performances of these artists might differ superficially, but they share in common the claim that technology has given a new dimension to human existence. Therefore, to determine this merging identity of mankind, we should explore the many layers that form our complex lives.  By looking into each one of these artworks, it can be revealed that human beings are constantly internalizing the influences of the outside world and constantly transforming.






It seems that technology is the instrument of mankind to transform the reality and ourselves. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there were some Italian artists that were inspired by the increasing speed of life and the new era of technological advancement.  “The Futurist Manifesto” by F.T. Marinetti, was a statement that envisioned the future of mankind.  The influence of war, the ability to create machines, the innovations of the electric light, the automobile and the plane, provided men with an endless power and progress never seen before. The futurist ideal of Marinetti projected a metamorphosis of form, where man and machine blended in a dense-sculptured body. 
Also, feelings and politics were outlined in the manifesto, which stated that the destruction of the past was necessary in order to construct a new future. The new identity of man could not be achieved without “glorifying war and the beauty of speed.” The splendor of the world was enhanced by the beauty of machine. The Manifesto had an aggressive character that rejected norms and values carried in social ideals. Feminism, art, and poetry were seen as week manifestations of the identity of mankind. In order to move forward and reach the future man should embrace technology and “feed the unknown.” Shift in shape and form to become indestructible. That was the vision of Marinetti, who anticipated that the new identity of mankind would take an anthropomorphic shape, in which machines, speed, noise and men would fuse. 



Likewise, in “Krapp’s Last Tape” by Samuel Beckett, it can be observed how the interaction of man and machine became essential through the pass of time. For Krapp, the use of a technological device made it possible to measure the changes and transformation in his identity when he was young, adult and then, elderly. He could detect that his way of thinking changed according to the age and moment in which he was living. And through the use of the recording machine, he connected his past thoughts with his new reflections.  That metaphysical reality was possible only for the use of the machine. “Just been listening to an old year, it must be at least ten or twelve years ago. At that time I think I was still living on and off with Bianca.” Krapp’s recorded thoughts and speeches transcended space and time and existed simultaneously in the room where an elderly Krapp sat next to the table.  A rewinding tape could connect the distant and blurred past with the present life of Krapp.  
However, there is another aspect in the interaction of man and machine that the play discusses. And it is the physical connection that Krapp developed to the device.  “He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front”. Krapp has been isolated from the company of family and friends, therefore, he is emotionally attached to the memories that the machine reproduces. When the machine played some passages in which Krapp felt alone, he would react with anger towards the machine, and then, Krapp would play other passages, in which he would feel happy. In Beckett’s play there are two ideas related to the interaction of man and technology. One is that men have a physical connection to machines, and second, the machines allow men to reach a new ethereal plane where the body cannot reach.


Similarily, in Kaspar by Peter Handke, the play debates about the influence that society has on individual’s personality, and how that influence shapes individual’s identity. The stage in the play is designed to reproduce an atmosphere of suspense. A laboratory, in which Kaspar is being taught to act like a person.  On one hand, Kaspar appears to be confused and behaves erratically. On the other hand, there is a strong presence on stage. Light and sound effects, simulate the presence of a superior being who watches Kaspar’s movements, and whose voice and commands could be heard through speakers. Kaspar’s “actions are accompanied by the sentences from the prompters. At first the sentences are adjusted to Kaspar movements, until Kaspar’s movements are gradually begin to adjust to the movements of the sentences” (82). Kaspar cannot escape from the influence of the voices, who command him constantly. That scene recreates the process of socialization that individuals experience in life. In our learning experiences at home, at school, or at work, we listen to authority figures who tell us what to do. In addition, Kaspar assimilates what the voices commanded him to do, and as a result, Kaspar wants to conform to their expectations. “I want to be a person like somebody else was once” repeats Kaspar (72). At the end of the play, many Kaspars appear on scene, wearing masks and acting in choreographed movements. Therefore, the play reflects that all humans are Kaspar. The norms of society, the values and hierarchical structures of class and race, religion and family institutions, also gender roles, are constructed ideas. Individuals assimilate ideas in their education that later are reproduced in their way of thinking and in their behavior. We are no taught to think by ourselves, but to follow the rules of society. We are being shaped to be submissive, and to accept what is already established. It can be concluded that the identity of human beings is socially constructed. The identity of individuals can be changed, shaped and transformed.


In the same way, in “From the Ice Cube Stage to Simulated Reality: Place and Displacement in Laurie Anderson’s Performances,” Silvija Jestrovic acknowledges that Anderson explores the “relationship between simulation and reality, the real and virtual worlds” in order to identify human evolution in space and time.  Her work involves cultural critique, political satire, parody, and simulation of reality. Anderson believes that we live in a highly technological world and that we have lost our sense of place. In her performances, she experiments with light effects, music, screen projections and storytelling to drive a major attention from the public. The new era of communication, the internet, and the cyber space have provided new forms of human interaction and representations. Anderson seems to be concerned with the new “sense of place and presence” that individuals experience nowadays in the cyber space. She distorts reality by projecting holograms, playing recorder music, adding gadgets in her body and altering her voice to distort our perception and to break free from the conventional behavior of society. But reality carries a duality for Anderson, sometimes is difficult to distinguish actuality from simulacrum. She states that “images are the main means of the contemporary mass media spectacles that perhaps most strongly define and influence our perception of reality.” She reaches the attention of her audience to bring awareness of the contemporary issues of society.
However, society is focused in the technological advancements, yet is not paying attention that we are losing the face to face interaction, which cannot be replaced by answer machines and artificial contact. It seems that technology is the instrument of mankind to transform reality and ourselves. Our bodies are designed to exist in the material plane, but our minds transcend that plane when reach virtual places though the use of devices. The new virtual interaction that humans experience, are part of our identity even though that does not seem natural.


           Equally, in “The virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier,” Guillermo Gomez Peña observes that the technological advancements of the 20th century made possible for mankind to expand towards a new frontier, but the down side is that our society has not changed in many aspects. Our identity still holds colonialist arguments and racial misconceptions. Peña criticizes that although the cyberspace seems to be a virtual place where society has equally opportunity of exploration, the true is that the dynamics of the cyberspace carry the same stereotypes and racial discrimination found in society. As an artist who works with technology, Peña found some obstacles regarding access to the net for being “Chicano.” He realized that the system blames Mexican and Latinos for not participate in new technologies. But Peña affirms that “people of color and women in the U.S. clearly don't have ‘equal access to cyberspace.” Lack of money, poor infrastructure and poor understanding of the “Western democratic values” used in the cyberspace, were some of the real causes for exclusion. Peña reflects that social and political structures are replicated in the cyberspace; therefore, nationality, social class, race and gender determine who has better access to the net. He concludes that Mexicans and Latinos are not unfitted to handle technology. Mexican and Latinos are just being relegated to a lower status in the cyberspace. It is fascinating to reveal that humans evolve, but at the same time continue to reproduce inequality in society. Elite classes own and dominate the mass and the media, and restrict the access to minorities that have been repressed along the century.  At some point, there are not distinctions between the physical plane and the virtual space for individuals. Because the virtual space is an extension of the material plane, we can find the same definitions and ideas of society. 




Also, in Ben Brantley ’reviews of the Wooster Group’s “House/Lights and To You The Birdie” a multimedia collage is exposed to the audience to experience a theater performance as never seen before. Television screens, amplifiers, microphones, voice alterations, music, lighting effects and actors fill up the scenario. According to Brantley “disorientation is the primary sensual pleasure in this presentation, even as it raises terrifying thoughts about the deeply mixed blessings of technological progress”. Through the use of the latest tools and technology, the Wooster Group has assembled a portrait that is functional and that could be compared with “Cubism.” The performances of the Wooster Group show many aspects of the same scene simultaneously, and that allows the viewer to conceive a new perspective of the theatre in the 20th century.
The Wooster Group presents its own theatrical vision that challenges the expectations of viewers. In "To You The Birdie" for example, rackets, men, skirts and funny sounds create a bizarre atmosphere that is enjoyable to the eyes and the senses. The Wooster Group is unique in its performances and communicates its art effectively. The theatrical representations are out of the ordinary, and that coexist in total harmony with the arrangements of sound, lights, microphones and movies projected on scene. It seems that these performances are created to project an identity that is confusing and uncertain. At the same time “House Lights and To You the Birdie” project the contemporary moment of human existence, where the use of technology permeates every aspect of life, and individuals consume and integrate technology into their lives.




Moreover, in “From/To Body To/From Robot,” Machiko Kusahara depicts the controversial artworks of Eduardo Cak, whose work “brings a concern toward one's identity including the role of physical body.” Cak has been experimenting on plants, animals and also creating real and artificial pieces. Some of his famous works are "Irapuru,” an actual Amazonian bird and a mythical creature that is recreated in museums by using artificial materials as metal and plastic. “Teleporting an Unkown State" is another of his works, in which Cak sends photons" via Internet to keep a real plant alive.
However, Kac seems to be pushing the limits of art into the technological advancements. Some of his experiments with genetics have drawn the attention of the public opinion in his projects. In one controversial "Living Works" projects, he modified the genetic code of a rabbit by injecting the genes of another organism. There has been a mutation in the rabbit that makes it glow when its dark. His experiments with genetics found some rejection from the public opinion. The unknown result provokes people to wonder if something wrong could happen, if our society could be affected by some experiment. Nevertheless, experiments on technology and genetics have been performed for many years already. New discoveries could help to solve persistent illnesses that affect humans, or simply take humankind to the next level of evolution.  

       Additionally, in Orlan: Is it Art? Barbara Rose informs that  we should not misunderstand rlan’s art because “our self- representations might not conform to an inner reality, they could be actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes-in the media or in society at large."  Since the end of the 1960's,  Orlan has been using her body as a medium to expose her most intimate concerns about woman's image and its role in society. Orlan performances are emphasized in the shifts of woman's image through the history and their representation in the mainstream. Women's figure were always idealized and manipulated. Sometimes women appeared as pure and angelical virgins, other times, women were categorized as promiscuous. Therefore, Orlan declares “being a narcissist isn't easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of recreating the self through deliberate acts of alienation Orlan  shifts her appearance  in each one of her programmed surgeries to reject the stereotypes that  society incites on women. Orlan uses the most advanced technology to sculpt her body, and to find her true self and identity.





            Furthermore, in Zombies & Cyborgs: The Cadaver, the Comatose & the Chimera by Stelarc "the body is an evolutionary architecture that operates and becomes aware in the world". In his performances Stelarc explores the limits and capacities of his body through the use technology. But he has not only amplified the functions of his body when he connects it to some machines, he has achieved a new dimension of evolution for mankind.
The ideals that Marinetti dreamed at the beginning of the 20th century have been reached by the inventions of Stelarc. Moreover, Stelarc created some machines that when attached to his body, provoke some behavior through electrical stimulation, remote assistance and the internet. His body becomes an organism that functions as an automatic machine, an antenna that receives commands and stimulus from external computers and the virtual space. Stelarc uses technology in his performances to stamp a new future vision for mankind. He is establishing that humans are meant to produce technology and that technology would shape our future.
To summarize, by analyzing how humans interact with technology, we can reflect on the complexities of our minds and reveal some debates about human identity.  The contemporary advancements in technology allow us to materialize our abstract ideas, to create tools, to communicate instantly, to move with speed through space and time. Yet the use of technology is also controversial, it generates invisible barriers for some, and opportunities of experimenting for others.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Stelarc's "Zombies and Cyborgs"


It seems that for Stelarc, man and technology are not two separated things. Mankind's identity  is intimately attached to  technology and that can be seen in the evolution of our specie. Therefore, man's bodies in their natural state would remain obsolete. 

According to Stelarc "the body is an evolutionary architecture that operates and becomes aware in the world". In his performances Stelarc explores the limits and  capacities of his body through the use technology. He has amplified the functions of his body by attaching the most advanced devices into his flesh and internal organs and by connecting his thoughts to electronic components. He wants to prove that there is harmony in the interaction of man and artificial intelligence since technology allows us to exercise our mental  powers, to exist in the virtual plane, and to prolong the existence of our bodies .


Mankind has evolved, adapted to changes and the reality determines that our bodies are the instrument to our minds. Stelarc created some machines that when attached to his body, provoke some involuntary behavior through electrical stimulation, remote assistance and the internet. His body becomes an organism that  functions as an automatic machine, an antenna that receives commands and stimulus  from external computers and the virtual space. Stelarc points out that the body behaves with "indifference" to the shifts and modifications that humans  apply to it,  and that allows some other things to occur. Therefore in some performances Stelarc behaves as a zombie, a cyborg and suspends his body hanged from hooks.



 In addition, it can sound like science fiction, but "the prosthetic augmentation and extended operational systems" of the body are part of the human life. We are more than familiar with the new technological advancements of our century although we do not reflect on them. Stelarc provides many examples to demonstrate that technology soaks our existence and that the exploration in medical and genetic fields demonstrate that our specie is reaching new frontiers.  Nowadays, "organs are extracted and exchanged, organs are engineered and inserted, blood flowing in my body today might be circulating in your body tomorrow. Ova are fertilized by sperm that was once frozen, limbs can be amputated from a dead body and reattached and reanimated on a living body, cadavers can be preserved forever." And cadavers might be reanimated in the future.

To sum up, Stelarc states that humanity and technology are blended together and that mankind's identity cannot be separated  from the virtual plane and artificial life. The intelligence of our minds have exceeded the capacities of our physical bodies, and the new advancements in technology, medicine and genetics amplify the functions of our bodies to endure and evolve towards the future.




Thursday, December 5, 2013

Forecast the Future

Times Square is the heart of New York. A place that gathers people and technology from around the world. The streets are filled with natural and artificial light. Neon signs have been replaced by billboards and huge HD screens that project the latest products on the market, films and entertainment.
The sounds of people's voices are mixed with the sounds of  traffic and music. Taxis, crowded theaters, night clubs and city bikes are part of the scene of Times Square.  Do not forget to bring your camera when you visit Times Square! 

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Orlan: Is it Art?

I am convinced that art has not limits, and that the function of art is to show us a point of view that we have not reflected about yet. When art challenges our perception, it  means that art is accomplishing something. In "Orlan and the Transgressive Art," Barbara Rose argues that the public opinion misunderstands Orlan's art because she questions if  "our self- representations conform to an inner reality or they are actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes-in the media or in society at large."  Can our images really reflect how we think and feel, and most important, what we think and feel can be separated from the influence of society?


Since the end of the 1960's,  Orlan has been using her body as a medium to expose her most intimate concerns about woman's image and its role in society. Orlan performances are emphasized in  the shifts of woman's image  through the history and their representation in the mainstream. Women's figure were always idealized and manipulated. Sometimes women appeared as pure and angelical virgins, other times, women were categorized as promiscuous. But what is Orlan arguing when she changes like a chameleon in each one of her programmed surgeries? Maybe, she is internalizing the message of society, or she could be battling against the natural aging process, also she might be reaching the definitions of aesthetics that were imposed to women. There are multiple possible reasons to discuss why Orlan uses the most advanced technology to sculpt her body, yet the most valid reason for me, is that she is showing what is like to be a woman in this society.
 

Many critics question Orlan's sarcastic customs and her attitude when entering the operating room, but the fact that she sells the removed parts of her body as pieces of art seems to be the major concern. However, all that is part of her performances. If we look closely, we will notice that any art form has become a commercial commodity. Without marketing or making any profit, art no longer could exist. When Orlan sells her removed body parts, she is selling the product of her performances, as well as her recorded shows and exhibitions. This French artist took her art from the gallery to the operating room, and that is the only difference.


 Orlan has been playing "the role of detached observer as well as patient." In her surgeries the local  anesthesia allows her to be conscious while the surgeon cuts her skin whit a scalpel. Performers dance choreographic movements, and herself , reads aloud with a steady voice.



ORLAN: IS IT ART?
ORLAN AND THE TRANSGRESSIVE ACT
The French performance artist whose assumed name is Orlan has embarked on a campaign of self-transformation through plastic surgery. The photo-documentation of her operation/performances furnishes both the imagery and the financial support for her art. Below, the author grapples with the many issues raised by a body of work that gives new meaning to the term "cutting edge."
BY BARBARA ROSE
Art in America 81:2 (February 1993), pp. 83-125

Being a narcissist isn't easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of recreating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.
--Orlan, L 'Acte pour L'Art
Do not misunderstand me too quickly.
--Barbara Rose
Orlan is not her name. Her face is not her face. Soon her body will not be her body. Paradox is her content; subversion is her technique. Her features and limbs are endlessly photographed and reproduced; in France, she appears in mass- media magazines and on television talk shows. Each time she is seen she looks different, because her performances take place in the operating room and involve plastic surgery. What we actually know about the video- and- performance artist who calls herself "Orlan" is less than what is known about Orlon, the synthetic fiber whose trade name closely resembles her chosen alias. This assumed name, moreover, will in turn be altered: when the total self-transformation she plans is complete, an advertising agency will select a new name consonant with her new image.
Throughout her career as a well- known French multimedia artist, Orlan has trafficked in notions of an ambiguous and constantly shifting identity. Her actions call into question whether our self- representations conform to an inner reality or whether they are actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes--in the media or in society at large.
Orlan's journey from the art gallery to the operating room began in the late '60s in the streets of her home town of St. Etienne. As part of the radical activities triggered by the liberation movements of les evenements de mai 1968, she improvised her first performances and public spectacles. In the '70s she did performance pieces in Lyons and, later,outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These consisted of abstract measuring actions relating her body to a medieval convent and to a modern art museum. Her subsequent work then came to relate religious iconography to structures of the art world. She challenged both religious traditions and art- world assumptions, the former through blasphemous imagery, the latter with real time/real place actions identifying art with life.l
As a star in her own literal "theater of operation,". Orlan leaves her background deliberately fuzzy, the better to maintain the anonymity required to project an enigmatic "star quality." Here is what we know: she was born on May 30,1947, in the industrial town of St. Etienne. In 1980 she moved to Paris. Her studio is in the working- class suburb of Ivry- sur- Seine, next. door to the insane asylum where the original artiste maudit, Antonin Artaud, died. Like El Greco and Gericault, who used inmates as models, she recruited inmates to appear in her early tableaux vivants, such as her video- and- performance piece inspired by Caravaggesque stereotypes, St. Orlan and the Elders. Presently she earns a living as a professor of fine arts at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in Dijon. She also sells images of her performances and her plastic surgery operations documented in films, videos and elaborate, staged photographs.
Like many artists of her generation both in France and in the U.S., Orlan was influenced by Duchamp. Her response was an extreme one: to consider her own body a "readymade." Through Ben Vautier, who showed her work in his famous Nice gallery where Yves Klein and so many other members of the French avant- garde got their start, she came into contact with members of Fluxus, and she continues to collaborate with Jean Dupuy. In 1971 she baptized herself "Saint Orlan," festooning her body with billowing draperies made of black vinyl or white leatherette. She exhibited these elaborate sculptural costumes in a show in Milan in 1972. Soon she began to wear her ever more exaggerated faux- Baroque costumes in staged tableaux vivants. High contrast color photographs of Saint Orlan, both living doll and living sculpture, were integrated into photo- collages, videos and films tracing a fictive hagiography.
Convinced that with its exaggerated emotionalism Bernini's St. Teresa in Ecstasy was the first postmodernist sculpture, Orlan found relationships between the forced pathos of Counter- Reformation esthetics and the historical references of contemporary artistic practice. The prototype image of Saint Orlan was a marble sculpture she carved and then, in the tradition of academic sculpture since the Renaissance, sent to be enlarged or "pointed up" to full scale. Her incarnation as Saint Orlan focused on the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore. She played off this long- entrenched dichotomy by exposing only one breast (as the nursing Virgin Mary is depicted), to differentiate Saint Orlan from a topless pinup. (The single exposed breast also referred to the Amazons of ancient mythology, represented as having only one breast to be free to sling warriors' quivers over exposed chests.)
In 1990, Orlan shed her saintly robes and decided to be "reincarnated" by altering her face and body through a series of carefully planned and documented operations. Her new medium would be her own flesh. The idea of turning surgical interventions into performance art occurred to her when she was operated on for an extra- uterine pregnancy under a local anesthetic which permitted her to play the role of detached observer as well as patient.
On her 43rd birthday, in 1990, Orlan had the first of the operation/performances that will totally transform her face and body. Thus far she has had five of the seven operations her project calls for. In her effort to represent an ideal formulated by male desire, she does not strive to improve or rejuvenate her original appearance (she has never had a face lift) but uses her body as a medium of transformation. The "sculpting" or carving up of her body sets up an intentional parallel between religious martyrdom and the contemporary suffering for beauty through plastic surgery that writers like Belgian feminist France Borel have identified as the rite of passage of our epoch.l
With self- transformation in mind, and proceeding with a cold, Cartesian logic buttressed by her considerable knowledge of esthetics and art history, Orlan began to deconstruct mythological images of women. Recalling that the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis made a practice of choosing the best parts from different models and combining them to produce the ideal woman, Orlan selected features from famous Renaissance and post- Renaissance representations of idealized feminine beauty. (Here one notes that the fetishization of body parts imposed on women by men since antiquity did not hold true for images of the masculine ideal. For male figures, ancient artists might improve on nature but the masculine ideal did not require fragmentation and recombination of the best parts of several models.)
Each of Orlan's operations is designed to alter a specific feature. Supplying surgeons with computer- generated images of the nose of a famous, unattributed School of Fontainebleau sculpture of Diana, the mouth of Boucher's Europa, the forehead of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, the chin of Botticelli's Venus and the eyes of Gerome's Pysche as guides to her transformation, Orlan also decorates the operating rooms with enlarged reproductions of the relevant details from these same works.2
But Orlan's female prototypes are also selected for reasons that go beyond the appearance of their "ideal" features--reasons involving history and mythology: she chose Diana because the goddess was an aggressive adventuress and did not submit to men; Psyche because of her need for love and spiritual beauty; Europa because she looked to another continent, permitting herself to be carried away into an unknown future. Venus is part of the Orlan myth because of her connection to fertility and creativity, and the Mona Lisa because of her androgyny--the legend being that the painting actually represents a man, perhaps Leonardo himself.
The operation/performances are choreographed and directed by the artist herself and involve music, poetry and dance. They are costumed, if possible, by a famous couturier. Paco Rabanne designed the vestments for the first operation. All the accoutrements, including crucifixes and plastic fruit and flowers, are sterilized in accordance with operatingroom standards, as are the photo blowups of preceding Orlan performances that decorate the operating room. Only state- certified surgeons operate.
To support her expensive and complex undertaking, Orlan earns money through the sale of the rights to her photos and videos and requires payment for interviews. The production, direction and casting of each operation become fodder for the photos, videotapes and films. As the French representative to the Sydney Biennial in December 1992, she included in the exhibition vials containing samples of her liquefied flesh and blood drained off during the "body- sculpting" part of the operations. These relics are also intended to be marketed to raise funds for the two remaining operations.
Orlan has a sense of humor, which led her to burlesque the selling of the artist rather than the art in an early work, Le Baiser de l'Artiste, 1977. Catherine Millet has described the scandal provoked when Orlan stationed herself outside the Grand Palais, site of FIAC, the French art fair, next to a life- size photo of her torso transformed into a slot machine that she identified as an automatic kiss- vending object. Customers who inserted five francs in the slot between the breasts could watch the coin descend to the crotch, at which point the live artist jumped off her pedestal to reward the purchaser with a real kiss. According to Millet, "this sexual union was like an X ray of the frenzy of exchange of contacts in the contemporary art world where the merchandising of the artist's personality replaces the merchandising of art."3
Official Portrait with a Bride of Frankenstein Wig, 1990 after the third operation , photograph mounted on aluminum, 59 by 39 inches. Photo Fabrice Leveque.
Orlan went to India to obtain enormous flashy billboards, of the type used to advertise popular Indian films. These have the highkitsch look of 1950s Hollywood posters. In addition to the artist herself, the billboards feature the surgeons and operating- room technicians, as well as supporting- cast actors and dancers. Not all the credits go to literal participants in the operating room: Pierre Restany, Achille Bonito Oliva and Hans Haacke, for example, get prominent billing because they have supported Orlan's work in the past.
In India, Orlan studied the Cult of Kali and gathered sacred texts describing the body as a sack or costume to be shed. She will read from these texts in her next operation/performance, which will transform her own fashionably retroussé nose into the long, pointed configuration favored by artists of the School of Fontainebleau. The African male striptease dancer who appeared in the first operation/ performance will be replaced in the next one by a classical Indian dancer.
Orlan asserts that art is a matter of life and death, and she isn't kidding: each time she is operated on, there is an increasing element of risk. She insists on being conscious to direct and choreograph the actions, so the operations take place under local rather than general anesthesia. The procedure, known as an epidural block, requires a spinal injection that risks paralyzing the patient if the needle does not hit its mark exactly. With each successive surgical intervention and injection, the danger is said to increase. Orlan may be playing Russian roulette by turning her body into an art work. To at least some degree she risks deformation, paralysis, even death. As the artist accepts mortality, she proposes, through the Kali references, a ritual interpretation of her actions as spiritual transcendence.
Orlan's work has many post- Duchampian precedents. By the time Body art became a full- fledged form of expression in America in the late 1960s, the element of risk had pretty well disappeared in more conventional forms of art. For Herbert Marcuse and his followers co- optation meant the death of art as a source of opposition to society. The enshrinement of the avant- garde in academia as well as its celebration in museums and international exhibitions exposed the romantic myth of the suffering artist, once but no longer marginal to society, as hardly relevant. Dennis Oppenheim, Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and others responded to this challenge with actions and performances involving conceivable or actual danger and pain. The eventual integration of Body art into the art market put an end to the effectiveness of their strategies. The bourgeois art audience proved to have as much of an appetite for Xrated Body art as for Pop sensationalism.
Orlan calls her work Carnal art to distinguish it from Body art, although she acknowledges common sources. As we have noted, the background of her work includes movie- poster images and reflects the cult of personality introduced into the art world by Duchamp and brought to full flowering by Warhol and Beuys. Duchamp's coy Rrose Sélavy directly inspired Orlan to imply that the beauty business is just another drag act. Warhol's twisted dandyism and his insistence that surface appearance is all that matters is certainly part of her history. More important, however, is Beuys's adoption of the role of a shaman whose wounds represent the sickness of society as a whole. By turning herself into a receiving set for signals sent by men to women for millennia, she absorbs and acts out the madness of a demand for an unachievable physical perfection.
Orlan acknowledges a specific debt to Herman Nitsch and the Viennese "Aktionismus" group that developed in the '60s--artists who startled spectators with their ritualistic staged imitations of blood sacrifices. Of all the Viennese artists, she is perhaps closest to Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who had himself photographed (supposedly) slicing off pieces of his penis as if it were so much salami.
A Mouth for Grapes, photograph mounted on aluminum, 20 by 31 1/2 inches, from the fourth operation/performance, "he Mouth of Europa and ihe Figure of Venus." Photo Joel Nicolas.
'A little while longer and you will see me no more. . . a little while longer and . . . you will see me . . . ," four video projections of images from "The Mouth of Europa and the Figure of Venus," accompanied by a text quoting the words of Christ before the Passion; at the 1992 Sydney Biennial. Photo Stephan Auirach.
However, there is a crucial difference between the Viennese actions and Orlan's peformances: with them as with many examples of Body art, there was an element of theatrical fakery. The barnyard and the abattoir, not the operating room, provided blood for the Viennese performance artists. "Documentary" photographs were frequently staged: Schwarzkogler did not bleed to death any more than Schwarzenegger's on-screen blood is real. (Nor did Yves Klein jump out a window.)
The methodical examination of the relationship between the fake and the real is the center point around which Orlan's deliberately "questionable" art revolves.4 I call it art because after considerable reflection I do believe that Orlan is a genuine artist, dead serious in her intent and fully aware of the risks and consequences of her elaborately calculated actions. In the end, the two essential criteria for distinguishing art from nonart, intentionality and transformation, are present in all her efforts. The photographs, videos and posters that are the residue of her performances are composed, structured and highly self- conscious. To conclude that Orlan's taboochallenging investigations are esthetic actions rather than pathological behavior forces us to reconsider the boundary that separates "normality" from madness,5 as well as the line that separates art from nonart. Indeed such an examination of the limits of art is a criical objective of her confrontational actions.6
Orlan's brutal, blunt and sometimes gory imagery flatters neither herself nor the public; it transmits disquieting and alarming signals of profound psychological and social disorder that nobody in his or her right mind wants around the house. Her program also provides a devastating critique of the psychological and physical consequences of the distortions of nature implied in the advanced technologies discovered by scientific research, from microsurgery to organ transplants to potential genetic engineering.7
Orlan's insistence that art is a life- or- death issue involving literal as well as metaphoric risk continues to raise the question of whether she is inspired or crazy. Her focus on the fine line separating the committed artist from the "committed" lunatic is a direct challenge to the ease of integration of much so- called critical art. She actively asserts the necessity of marginality and danger. The extremity of her stance causes one to wonder if going on stage and smearing chocolate on one's nude body may be a cop- out for both artist and voyeur.
Orlan's performances might be read as rituals of female submission, analogous to primitive rites involving the cutting up of women's bodies. But actually she aims to exorcise society's program to deprive women of aggressive instincts of any kind. During the process of planning, enacting and documenting the surgical steps of her transformation, Orlan remains in control of her own destiny. If the parts of seven different ideal women are needed to fulfill Adam's desire for an Eve made in his image, Orlan consciously chooses to undergo the necessary mutilation to reveal that the objective is unattainable and the process horrifying. Orlan the artist and the woman will never play the victim: she is both subject and object, actress and director, passive patient and active organizer. This still leaves us with the disquieting question of whether masochism may be a legitimate component of esthetic intention, or whether we are dealing here not with art but with illustrated psychopathology. This is the crucial question in a context in which real and fake, art and anti-art view for attention.
Orlan's medium, finally, is media. If that sounds redundant, she means it to be. Her critical method is based on a sophisticated feedback system, a vicious circle of echoing and self- generating images, spawning a progeny of hybrid media reproductions This continuous feedback loop is difficult to escape long enough to gain sufficient distance to decode the meaning of her performances and their afterlife as documents, relics and replicated image banks. The visceral effect and sensory overload of her imagery, however, are sufficiently alienating to afford the detachment required for judgment and interpretation. She creates esthetic distance through a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt or alienation effect on which his stylized theater was based. Orlan attacks the Judeo- Christian l tradition of the sacredness of the body and its taboos against mutilation to transgress a boundary as well as to alienate rather than . evoke empathy in the audience.
Because of the interactive nature of contemporary communication systems, whatever is said about an art work becomes attached to it as an additional meaning. So it is altogether appropriate that the article you have just read is actually the work that Orlan will exhibit in the show titled "Is It Art?" curated by Bard College instructor Linda Weintraub.8 Read: Feedback, Recycle, Vicious Circle.
Author: Barbara Rose is a critic and curator.
1. France Borel, Le Vétement Incarné, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1992. Borel considers mutilation, tattooing, scarification, plastic surgery and other bodily interventions within an anthropological context.
2. Vittorio Fagone, "Con il chirugo in cerca de Venere," Il Messaggero, Aug. 13, 1992.
3 Catherine Millet, L'Art Contemporain en France, Paris, Flammarion, 1987.
4 Dr Cherif Zahar, who performed three of the first five operations, describes them in Fiebig-Betuel, "Orlan or Lent" and "Document: Texte pour l'Operation d'Orlan," both articles in VST 23/24, Sept..Dec. 1991.
5. VST, Revue Scienfique et Culturelle de Santé Mentale 23/24, Sept.-Dec. 1991. This entire psychoanalytic publication is dedicated to the relationship of Orlan's work to psychopathology and esthetics and contains articles by psychologists, critics and artists concluding that Orlan's surgery projects are indeed art.
6. Bernard Ceysson, "Saint Orlan: Vingt Ans d'Art et Publicité," exhibition catalogue, Musée St. Etienne, 1989.
7. Orlan's relationship to technology is explored by Gladys Fabre in "Femme sur les barricades: Orlan Brandit le laser," Skai et Sky Video Editions, 1984.
8. The exhibition, "Is It Art?," was scheduled to take place in the fall of 1992 at Bard College's Blum Art Institute, which ceased operations in December [see A.i.A., Jan. '93], causing the show's postponement. It is now in preparation for a later date, in 1993, and plans are in the works for a national tour.

Monday, November 11, 2013

From/To Body To/From Robot

Eduardo Kac blends the natural and synthetic aspects of human existence in his artworks. He creates artificial and mechanic pieces that simulate green spaces, such as "Irapuru," which recreates the  forests and their native animals. He also experiments on alive beings, such as  "Teleporting an Unknown State," in which the artist sustains the life of a plant through the use of a projector that transmit photons. But there is more about this experimental artist that generates controversy.

Kac seems to be pushing the limits of art into the new  times of advancement in technology. Some of his experiments with genetics have draw the attention and the public opinion on his projects. In one of his "Living Works" projects, he modified the genetic code of a rabbit by injecting the genes of  another organism. There has been a mutation in the rabbit that makes it glow when its dark.

Some questions that Kac's artworks have generated are related with the limits of human free will. Should humans be allowed to modify the natural course of life? It seems that the human race has done that and much more during the history of our evolution. If we take a close look into the history and development of our existence, we will notice that humans had modify every aspect of life. Moreover, the life itself is a construction of ideas and materialized thoughts. Starting from how we look, and continuing on what we eat , or where we live, or how we think and more, we can see that all these aspects had been created and  modified through the pass of time. The human race has reached this moment of technological advancement, and it is experimenting and using these new tools on an unknown terrain.

Eduardo Kac is a pioneer in the art of biotechnology. Many critics can argue that what he is doing is wrong. But in the actuality, the agribusiness  are experimenting and modifying the food that most people in the industrialized countries consume just to make more profit.  Isn't that questionable?



FROM/TO BODY TO/FROM ROBOT
Machiko Kusahara
When Eduardo Kac showed his piece "Teleporting an Unkown State" at Siggraph 96, the public might have wondered how one could transfer sunlight via the Internet. A young plant was in total darkness in the Siggraph Art Gallery. If it did not receive enough light it would die.
In this project any participant from all over the world could capture the "photons" using one's own web camera and "send the photons" via Internet. The signals were transferred immediately to the computer at the exhibition site thus giving power to a projector hanging above the young plant. It was only the participants' collaborative will that kept the plant alive and growing. This plant grew from a seed without knowing the outer world and real sunlight.
"Teleporting an Unknown State" can be compared to Ken Goldberg's "Telegarden" in the sense that it involved a real plant, and that visitors from the network shared the responsibility in taking care of it. However, there is something very different in "Teleporting an Unknown State". It is an element that can be associated with the latter part of the title, "Unknown State". While non-material elements such as photons and the network are the medium or vehicle for such physical phenomenon as people sending enough light to a plant, we observe a strong desire for committment toward physical entity and the involvement of one's own body.
It might be deeply related to the fact that Kac was born and grew up in Brazil and then moved to US. Certain similarity can be observed with Stelarc who was born in Australia and lived in Japan for a while before he started using eletronic technology in his performances. Confrontation with different cultures inevitably brings a concern toward one's identity including the role of physical body. Also, artists such as Kac or Stelarc would say that they do not fully believe in the Utopia of cyberspace. In appreciating Kac's works, we gain a renewed sense of connection between the real and physical world and our own bodies, plants and animals.
Looking from the point of view of telerobotics, no mechanical or kinetic output was realized by participants via the Net in "Teleporting an Unknown State". Yet, the nature of physical (in this case optic) interaction it involves and the clever way to transmit such physical interaction over the Net can be regarded as another possibility in telerobotic art. However, among projects by Kac who is known as "telepresence artist", works such as "Ornitorrinco" and "Rara Avis" are more directly related to the notion of telerobotics.
The "Ornitorrinco" project started in 1989 and was developed with Ed Bennett. It was shown in many different configurations until 1996. In this project, participants could move around remotely on the body of a small robot using a live video conferencing connection. "Ornitorrinco in Eden" took place in 1994, and was, together with Goldberg's "Mercury Project" (1994), the first telerobotic artwork on the Internet. The main issue in the "Ornitorrinco" project was the participants' experience and the process itself in real time over real space. The robot reacted to each input from participants rather than being programmed for certain goal or action, realizing "democracy" in the multi-user environment, according to Kac. Again, such awareness of democracy and real time/space shows Kac's basic attitude toward technology, interactive art, and society.
In "Rara Avis" (1996), a gallery visitor walks into a triangular room and finds a large aviary in front of her. There is a group of monochrome birds in the cage and a colorful large telerobot macaw. There is a VR headset on the pedestal. When the visitor wears the headset, she discovers that she is seeing through the eyes of the electronic macaw. The visitor then recognizes herself on the Head-Mounted Display (HMD) screen through the robot-bird's eyes, seen from inside the cage. As the viewer moves her head the same movement takes place with the macaw's head thus causing a change of viewpoint on the HMD.
Here, the identity of the viewer and its position is trapped in an endless loop involving inside and outside, freedom and captivity, seeing and being seen, to manipulate and to be manipulated. The front of the cage separates the free space that opens to the outer world (remember, the room is triangular) from the captured state inside the cage that leads to a narrow end. The configuration of the space is metaphorical both in psychological and social aspect. From an epistemological point of view, telerobotic technology places the viewer both inside and outside the cage. It is said that we receive approximately 90% of the information we get from outside through our visual system. And our cognition is formed based on the input we get. Then, the consciousness of the viewer, in this case, should be floating in the cage, while her body remains outside the cage.
The work brings up questions about the reality of our life through contradictions, as is shown in the contrast between monochrome real birds and the colorful artificial (robot) bird in the cage. In our daily life we take it for granted that we live in a single, real world, with a single body and conscisouness -- but is our condition really that secure?
With the advent of the Internet, living virtually in another community (or another space) is becoming an ordinary aspect of life. Having another 'self' in another world as an avatar is also possible. But then, where do we live -- where are our bodies? Is the reality of life attached to the space one belongs with the physical body, or to the space one's consciousness belong to? Or do we belong to different spaces at the same time in a loop of switching realities? With his life belonging to different cultures in the real world, Kac visualizes the problems we will face in the near future with the layered metaphors in his work. Rara Avis is a work that can really be read in multidimensional ways.
Further expanding his previous telepresence work, in 1999 Kac realized a new telerobotic piece, entitled "Uirapuru". The piece was shown at the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, and won a major award at its Biennale. Roy Ascott, who was a member of the jury, commented as follows: "Eduardo Kac eschews consolidation in favour of a kind of risk-taking hybridization, irreverently mixing not only communications media but modalities of myth, metaphor and representation. It is a risk that pays off poetically, providing us with a kind of Roussel/Rousseau world, in which pockets of cyberspace punctuate an almost mall-like plastic reality. Here the pingbirds sing the song of the Internet, the telerobotic blimp rises over a forest of fake vegetation, awakening us to the dawn of a new world, a multi-user universe, of VRML, streaming video and telepresence. In this jungle of communications complexity, the duality of being is celebrated with a lighthearted and brilliantly orchestrated joy." [1]
It was a breathtaking sight that a visitor encountered at ICC, as one entered Kac's space on the fifth floor of the Tokyo Opera City Building, in Shinjuku, the heart of the business district in central Tokyo. An enormous fish, which was a radio controlled blimp in tropical colors, floated in the sky above the canopy of palm trees and other tropical vegetation inhabited by a few tropical artificial birds. The trees looked quite realistic, but a closer look revealed they were artificial as well. There were two winding paths in the forest which led to a bench. The visitor was invited to stop and rest. The physical world in the gallery was simulated in the VRML world which one could see on one of the flat screens at the rim of the artifical rain forest. Visitors experienced seamless interactivity both in real space and virtual space on the Net, forming their own narratives as they negotiated the multiple layers of agency enabled by "Uirapuru".
Kac explained the piece as follows:
"The word "Uirapuru" is the name of both an actual Amazonian bird and a mythical creature. In the rain forest the bird Uirapuru sings once a year, when it builds its nest; even then, only from five to ten minutes early in the morning. According to the legend, Uirapuru's song is so beautiful that all other birds stop singing to listen to it. Both in legend and reality Uirapuru is a symbol of rarefied beauty. (...) My version of the legend presents Uirapuru as a flying fish and reinvents Uirapuru's dual status as a real animal and a mythical creature through an experience that is at once local and remote, virtual and physical. Uirapuru's own spirit is hosted by a virtual fish, who flies and interacts online in virtual space with other virtual fish. (...) The telerobotic fish hovers above a forest populated by colorful pingbirds. Pingbirds are telerobotic birds that send ping commands to servers geographically located in the Amazon region (where the rainforest is located). The pingbirds sing the songs of real Amazonian birds according to the rhythm of global network traffic. In "Uirapuru" greater Internet traffic results in the telerobotic birds singing more often." [2]
As I sat down on the bench, watching the whimsical fish hovering peacefully above the forest canopy while listening to the "pingbirds" sing, the strange feeling I already had since I had entered the space grew stronger. The strange feeling was about the "physical reality" of the space. The artistic/artificial walk-in diorama of the Amazonian rain forest is the multiple layered interface between the real, physical world, and the virtual world. We believe the Amazon rain forest is natural. We believe we live in a real, physical world. But the physical world in the gallery, the rain forest, is already totally artificial. The bird which sings the spirit of the rain forest in the Amazonian myth has turned into a plastic fish, floating in the air.
But that's not all. Everything in the gallery, the physical space, seems to have a double meaning or a double state. The two worlds interact with one another via both physical and digital interfaces. Uirapuru, which is a bird in reality and in legend, is represented as a fish, which usually lives in a different world. Birds in this physical space represent the information flow on the Internet with digitally recorded songs of the real Amazonian birds. In the gallery we can manipulate the blimp, which observes us from above and broadcasts what it sees. The blimp resists complete control, as it is not possible to make it stop in mid air with absolute precision. At the same time the blimp is being observed, under constant surveillance. Here again, like in Rara Avis, we find ourselves within an endless loop of contradicting states, to see and to be seen. Our consciousness seems to hover above the edge of physical space and its counterpart in virtual reality. Artificial Reality, was the term we used before the phrase Virtual Reality became popular. Maybe the term should come back. In "Uirapuru" Kac offers a mythical world in an intentionally lighthearted way. In this world, experience oscillates between being present and being telepresent, between being oneself and being something else. In this work Kac shows that real and virtual constitute each other and that their boundaries are no longer firm or evident.
NOTES
1. Ascott, Roy. "Judge's Review", in ICC Biennale '99; Interaction. (eds.) Komatsuzaki, Takuo. Kawai, Haruko. (Tokyo: InterCommunication Center, 1999), p. 55.
2. Kac, E. "Uirapuru", published by the InterCommunication Center as a gallery leaflet and distributed during the Biennial (1999). Also published online at: http://www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html.
Originally published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 7, Number 10, no page numbers. Uploaded December 2, 1999.



Machiko Kusahara is a Tokyo-based electronic art critic and curator. She is committee member of several organizations, including: InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo; Ars Electronica Interactive Category Jury (1987-89); Japanese Ministry of Culture's Media Art Festival (planning committee and jury); UNESCO Web Prize jury (1988-89); Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (collection committee). She teaches at the Kobe University. Her writings on electronic art have appeared in many books, journals, and magazines worldwide.



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