Re: [-empyre-] gendered viractualism
From: "Melinda Rackham" <melinda@unsw.edu.au>
where I am coming form is the idealisation of disembodiment is a sort of
silicon anorexia fantasy - mirroring the fear of embracing theflesh, rather
than from any position of moral wrongness.
Hi Melinda. That?s one way of looking at it. But why assume a fear - which
implies rejection? Why not embrace both the dis and em viractual body at the
same time? Again, why not both simultaneously? We need to acknowledge, I
think, that these approaches are complementary, even to some extent
interchangeable, and not mutually exclusive.
For me, a work of viractual hermaphroditic/mechanomorphic art may present
just this challenge - exploding frameworks and requiring new understandings,
as the viractual require us to redraw the contours of parts of language and
the concepts and sensations they enfold. Indeed, I think that such viractual
hermaphroditic states may give greater scope to an imaginative ? even
chimeric - vision which takes us toward better self-knowledge, a
self-knowledge which includes a merging of one gender state, if not into
another, at least into a more expanded version of gender. So the technique
of viractual hermaphroditic art, for me, is to make subjects and objects
unfamiliar, to make form difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception of art because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in
itself and must be prolonged.
For most of us, the hermaphroditic is a semi-self-abandonment. It breaks us
slightly away from the brief life of an individual and the enclosed, fragile
existence one knows, to hatch out for flight through an experience beyond
social bounds. The things of the narrow actual world therefore undergo a
reduction in significance even while strictly virtual means may also be
abandoned and the virtual becomes a somewhat indifferent means to viractual
ends.
This possible ecstasy of self-forgetting weakens the links of consciousness
to a domain of rational purposes and breaks us loose from an identity
anchored there. Consequently viractual strength accumulates in the reality
and attraction of what lies beyond, even though it may strike the person
looking on from outside as strangely abstract and nebulous.
ill just go off on my tangent here... I do believe that disembodiment is
a
trick.. just like we all thought virtuality was a trick once , or haraways
god-trick of objectivity.. we cant be separated..
Perhaps it is helpful to remember here that quantum theory recognizes that
particles manifest themselves as distinct quanta of energy at different
frequencies, but are also found as non-localized waves; and these waves may
themselves be derived from the "plenum" or vacuum state, a kind of residue
of potential energy. Thus it is possible to say that the distinct states of
viractual manifestation are distinguished according to the degree to which
that potentiality is energized.
Recently, particularly interesting to me is the dialectic between theory and
practice in respect to the viractual. Can a viractual artwork combine
explicitly theoretical discourse with actual intuitive practice? Can
viractual art show that the two are not "opposed"? The key word here may be
the term 'explicit'. Without it, it seems that any discourse with
pretensions of viractual explanation is theoretical. In this sense, almost
all conceptual art has reconciled theory and practice. On the other hand,
however, only discourses which situate themselves within a theoretical
viractual frame can claim to be 'explicitly' viractual. In other words, for
a discourse to claim an explicitly theoretical status, it is necessary to
hold continuity through various rhetorical effects such as the use of
certain jargon with other discourses of 'recognized' theory. Since there is
still no such framework for the viractual within to place viractual artwork,
I think it is very hard for me to play the role of explication. In other,
plain words, viractual art can do viractual theory, but it cannot call it so
because theory, as a practice, has defined itself in explicit exclusion, not
so much of intuitive practice, but of art.
An explicitly theoretical discourse such as philosophy has no problem
finding actual phenomena that may accommodate them with different sorts of
social/political practices. On the contrary, there are many that see these
hybrids not to be the exception but the rule. In other words, viractual
artworks combine theory and practice and may serve as living proof of the
fact that theory and practice are not opposed... but so do many other social
and political phenomena. However, some may sustain that this combination
does not prove anything against theorists who still try to avoid all contact
with intuitive practice, because it is the pursuits of both pure theory and
purely intuitive practice which end up allowing for such combinations as
that which takes place in viractual art. They would say that it is the idea
that there are two separated realms of the virtual and the actual which
ultimately 'invites' and makes the viractual transgression of the boundary
between them possible. Many post-Foucaltians sustain this.
I am trying to argue here that the way viractual art combines into
virtual/actual practice does not mean that viractual art has transcended
theory, but on the contrary, it is dependent on the constructs of a
viractual theory which is still in the making.
To apply this to trickster consciousness would suggest that a possible
criterion for making qualitative distinctions is the degree to which the
neutral or potential state of viractual consciousness (its quality as
awareness of awareness, pure consciousness) is experienced as false. Thus a
clear experience of this trickster consciousness by itself constitutes a
fourth state of consciousness, as distinct from waking, dreaming and
sleeping. This viractual state functions as a gateway to a fifth state in
which hermaphroditic consciousness is retained as a basis for or backdrop to
perception and action. Hence, we can view art as a generative set of
viractual relations rather than a closed statement.
and technologically
mediated art - particularly multiuser 3d which im working on at teh
moment
, is a totally embodied multisensory experience.. .
In terms of the "development" of digital art in recent times, its
self-consciousness may be perceived as a movement toward understanding its
own viractuality. I think that the undermining of digital assumptions by the
multiplication of narrative identity functions ultimately as a way of
opening up the capacity for viractual plurality. Aesthetic viractual
distance seems to require that state of balance between involvement and
detachment, experiencing and comprehending, in which the work can be said to
resonate with and enliven all the receptive (sensitive) and organizing
attributes of viractuality stylistically and ideologically. Moreover,
appreciating the viractuality of art is a major element in aesthetic
satisfaction, which seems to be shorthand for consciousness functioning in
an alchemic way, operating at the level at which it can take in the
implicate order.
.perhaps the
disembodiment idea relates more to how we think about ourselves acting in
the world on a regular basis than about how we theorise ourselves in
mediated soft spaces?
Perhaps you are right. Here I think the looking/thinking/imagining process
of working with / looking at the still painterly format ? as opposed to the
doing / interacting process of experiencing VEs - ironically better
experientially supports theories of disembodiment. Funny that. But perhaps
viractual disembodiment consciousness as obtained in the looking position
may be said to be more self-sufficient and thus more hermaphroditic.
In this respect painting's unique distinction is much less in what viractual
painting does or attempts to do using digital tools, but in HOW it does it.
One of the things that painting does pretty well is to present simultaneous
imagery that lingers for contemplation. Viractual painting presents mutually
exclusive conditions at the same time ? both formally and in its content.
If computer animation can be compared to a reel of tape, then viractual
painting can be compared to random access memory. That all the information
is available all the time is something that viractual painting has going for
it. Too often we concentrate on this quality as a weakness and make futile
attempts to bring the element of time into an art form that is the strongest
at presenting a timeless and simultaneous image that exists in a virtual
space.
The hermaphroditic condition means overcoming the tendency for thought to
analyze itself in terms of a presumed separation between the process of
thinking and the content of thought that is its product. This hermaphroditic
view clarifies the viractual issue in one sense; namely that thinking is a
process consisting of the transformations of "thought-events" as continuous
waves. Thoughts are not distinct from thinking, and similarly "I" am not
distinct from the process by which I recognize myself. Thought, thinking and
thinker are a hermaphroditic continuity.
Taking it a step further, it makes sense to see hermaphroditic thinking,
thought, perceived-self and experienced-world as a non-localized flow of
awareness, in which viractual blips occur. Thoughts, locations, events,
objects (all of which are only relatively circumscribed), remain subject to
the inter-penetration and modification which characterizes the double
viractual flow.
recently I went into char Davies immersive VR ephemere and i came out with
sore legs from squatting to much.. it may seem dreadfully modernist to say
it but I can never leave my physical construction behind...
Nothing is left behind - but the viractual experience is one of
self-liberation, a breaking free of an ordinary place cramped among the
oppressive desiderata of individual existence. For most of us, the concept
of the hermaphroditic indicates an unknown and undefinable totality of
internal flux that is at the same time the ground of all things and of the
process of thought itself. That is an unleashing by way of the movement of
intelligent viractual perception that bursts bonds. With viractual
hermaphroditic depictions an extremely pliable state of consciousness,
resting on the basis of relaxed (extended) attentiveness, may thus become
available; and it is within this elastic framework - ideally constituted
both between artist and audience and within the individual awareness of each
participant - that viractual consciousness takes place. When this does
occur, even to a limited degree, one has, not surprisingly, an experience,
which brings a sense of communion and completeness.
my solid core
colony of self, which is of course is simultaneously a slippery self, -
I find this very viractual ? as opposed to virtual or modern. When body
consciousness is in this condition it additionally recognizes the viractual
quality as its own basis - it is not only self-referential but also fully
integrated within itself and with everything (which is another way of saying
the same thing). Here the viractual self is experienced as capacity, rather
than existential identity. It is therefore correct to call such
consciousness viractual precisely because it does not merely amend but
radically revises the evaluation of self from bound to boundless and back
again. Such a viractual consciousness represents a paradigm shift which
relativizes all other recognitions of the phenomenon of self-consciousness.
As awareness, the viractual contains attributes of sensitivity,
discrimination and re-organization. It is the generative power for activity
within new viractual contexts and frames of reference. It thus inevitably
gives rise to other viractual states in which increasingly fundamental
implicate orders of manifestation are unrecognized. Indeed, it is such
unrecognitions of viractual levels in art creation that is the only way in
which art consciousness can develop further within new technologies.
my
parinama - the Buddhist notion of alterity, or ?becoming otherwise? where
the identity of the self which is really non-self in never fixed and is
changing from moment to moment.
"Altered" states of consciousness, whether through tech, dreams, drugs, art
or "mystical" practice, have, whatever their respective shortcomings, always
been attractive in the final instance because they offer "more", in terms of
our experience and understanding of ourselves and our universe. We normally
conceive of this as a disclosure of different levels or ways of perceiving
an opening of doors (Blake) or bypassing of valves (Huxley). The viractual
model implied here is largely synchronic: the doors open suddenly and
mysteriously under the influence of viractual art. Here the body?s awareness
of itself as plenum cannot be surpassed or added to. But the latent power of
viractual perception, which it unfolds, may allow it to identify two
important aspects of the manifest order of things.
The first of these is the ability to perceive increasingly viractual
structural principles "hidden" within the ways we think and behave, and to
see evidence of similar principles in the implicate orders enfolded within
more clearly visible levels of viractual manifestation (i.e. features of
viractual art models). Ultimately this implies being aware of viractual
design or formative causation at its most delicate or subtly compacted level
- sensing the blueprint for any emergent viractual event or activity in its
specificity.
The second distinct level is one where all material form is found to exist
as transformational energy, "beyond" even any specific blueprint. Here,
viractual consciousness has an awareness of its own characteristics as
potential is united with matter in its ground state as energy filled void
(or Vedanta, if you like).
Of course, the trouble with many such descriptions, whether artistic or
mystical, is that ineffability or enthusiasm may convey the value, but often
obscure the mechanics.
even when I am in an altered physiological
state because of my virtual experience its precisely the chemical flows
thru my physicality that allow that weird brain trick of disembodiment to
happen...
Yea. But it sounds like here you are blasted out of your mental set
experiencing no longer what you thought you knew but more a prelude to
knowing. The recognition process therefore involves a stopping or unseating,
a prying-loose from former bonds of identity, which is uncomfortable, or
puzzling, or exciting, or all three. Viractual defamiliarizations shift
awareness from one set of criteria by which we recognize "reality" to
another and back.
to hack french femminism we are all already, both feminine, masculine ,
transgender, hemaphrodite,neuter, viral or whatever , the sex which is not
one, always doubly aware and touching ourselves, perhaps technology just
points this out?
Oh yes. This is how I see it too. The boundaries, which make up the various
territories of the horizontal plane of objective or historical knowledge,
are transcended by their relation to the depth of the virtual and the mythic
representations by which we attempt to grasp it. All branches of learning in
this light begin to resemble the hybrid composition of the viractual. They
are metaphors or translations of something both separate from them yet alive
in the spirit which animates them. So the viractual/hermaphroditic domain is
one where the person not only transcends the narrow and bogus values of
bourgeois individuality, but also frees him/herself from desires for
intellectual assurance which animate the familiar experience of everyday
life.
JN
m
> Do you feel that woman do not wish to question - and unlasso ? their
> traditionally assigned epistemological status? Even without citing the
> efficacious theoretical influence of Donna Haraway's cyborg-theory,
> depictions of viractual post-flesh seem to courageously facilitate an
> inebriated subjectivity by constructing an imaginative space of
> accommodation. Here flamboyant self-reliant relationships between the
> protoplasmic body-image and virtual spatial conceptions are visualized
as
> self-prosthesis. Indeed, female cultural producers who do not take some
> slant on this self- transcendent tilt by now look dismally
gendercentric.
Do
> you think men are being disingenuous by proposing this hemaphrodite
posture?
> Given our period?s death, or explanation of, the mythic Father/God - I
think
> not.
>
> In the viractual mechanomorphic operation, the paradoxically
simultaneous
> experiences of sex, death and immortality that is fundamental to Western
> religious practice is laid bare into a post-flesh art by virtue of a
> relocation of body/machine/consciousness. That such a semi-programmable
> philosophy engages our contemporary fixations today is not remarkable.
>
>
>
> Meilleures salutations,
> Joseph Nechvatal
>
>
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> "Like philosophy, art exceeds lived experience by creating an approach
to
> chaotic virtuality."
> -Tamsin Lorraine, "Irigaray and Deleuze : Experiments in Visceral
Philosophy
>
>
*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*:-.,*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*
:-.,_
>
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