[-empyre-] gendered viractualism

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

hey joseph and everyone
just back for ISEA.. good to meet the other empyrean's there ..
which brings me to my questions... and some snippets from the last weeks
texts concerning corporeal presence and the body.....

yes the body..that thing that propells us around, that makes our emotions,
that thing that is us.. a metacolony of virii and bacteria all symbiotically
bound to one another to make up what we call human..

> viractual  unity. Here the corporeal heavy weight of the body takes on a
> lightness of being.

> branching possibilities. The hyper telematic/immersive suggests that the
> viractual body is but the temporary hardware housing a vast and luminous
> software immateriality. In this realm of discourse the viractual corporeal
> is a complex compendium of multiplicity and distribution which adds up to
a
> total-art work (gesamtkunstwerk ) - though an undiagramic one.
>
> By identifying an individual's hyper-real presence in a vaporously
> technologically stored set of bits, the post-modernist existential concept
> of the logocentric individual has been supplanted by the fabulated
> electronically produced simulacrum-persona.

why does  the individual with thier body dissapear in the viractual
merge...?
i tend to think of actual and virtual as a spatial continum.. l and think
that peraps many people already live simultaneusly  in parallel universes
..not just thoes with certified mental disorders, or those with spiritual or
sharmanic beliefs where another sphere of reality is overlaid on to hard
space.. im thinking of  thoes that are educated in certain ways.. i see
sub-structures and data paths when i look at the actual world because of my
particular  interests..  for a while there i used to dream in code, im sure
medical practioners observe the body casually in a different way than
others, architecs can over lay cad without any effort, lighting designers
may see schematics in a theatre,  designers see colour in RGB values..

so what is wrong with the physicality of the material body..? yes we are all
open systems of data and biological fluxes and flows and we are
simultaneously hard and rooted to the earth ..  i tthink by setting up these
categories of opposition like fixed/temporary, individuality/multiplicity
etc etc it   brings the actual and the virtual into more difference than
merging.
 ----

> As the tale of Hermaphroditus suggests, my work now is about pansexual
> eroticism married to virtuality, quixotic transformation, and, of course,
> immersive excess. The viractual realm here is a political-spiritual
chaosmos
> in the sense that new forms of sexual order arise such that any form of
> order is only temporary and provisional. But I don't think it is a
chaosmos

>
> The point is that within viractual creation all sexual signs are subject
to
> boundless semiosis - which is to say that they are translatable into other
> signs. Here, of course, it is possible to find resonances and affinities
> between sexual opposites. Here we can always articulate new sexes within.
> Here a new-sprung chameleon-like sexual demeanor is being built from the
> virtual abyss.

while not wanting to be essentialist, and believing that gender is to an
extent performance.. it is also a phyisicality - interresting things happen
within the body according to flows of eostrogen and testosterone... from my
observation men are far more interrested in the hemaphrodite than women..
and men take up female roles more often than women take up male roles in
virtual space... while women also seem to be for more interrested in
exploring  what is engendered as  female --  which sort of  leaves the
masciuline body as an empty shell..

coudl you say more about where the gendered body resides... and  what forms
of sexual order do you see being created.. (i know writers like Greg Egan in
books like Distress  create specific new gender orders for the future of
biologically and technically enhanced humans , but i dont think this is what
you are refering to?)

melinda