[-empyre-] 'The art of the accident'

[Timothy Murray]

Welcome, Steve,

Thanks so much for your fascinating post on 
Virilio's museum of accidents.  As you may recall 
from my brief presentation at the San Francisco 
Virilio conference, a small part of which I 
include below, I am troubled by the irony that 
his artistic interests distance him from exciting 
developments in new media art.

While Viriio expresses concern about "speed 
pollution," we could take the lead from many 
artists, such as Irvine's Beatriz da Costa, who 
has profited from the speed of technological 
interfaces to map the air pollution streams 
traced by slow flying pigeons carrying miniature 
monitoring devices.  In this case, speed 
pollution itself ends up helping to counter the 
degrading conditions of the inefficient 
technologies that pollute the air.  To be fair, 
it is important to note that Virilio moderates 
the pessimism of his account of interactive media 
by acknowledging the importance of tracking its 
future.  In an interview with me and Gaëten 
Lamarche Vadel in Sites, the journal of 20th 
century French Studies, he marvels at how 
"programmed situations make images appear that we 
wouldn't have imagined, because they themselves 
have been subject to modifications linked to the 
environment that one has created around them. 
There you rediscover the accident.  I am an 
amateur of accident.  I think that the accident 
is the future form of art."

If accident is the future form of art, it's 
ultimate expression will take place, he suggested 
in the same interview, in the form of passage 
through which the environment of events consists 
of an environment of passage, one that ultimately 
ruptures the unity of time and place. 

But I remain uncertain about how far Virilio is 
willing to open himself to the accidental future, 
at least in the arena of the arts.  For his 
notion of artistic resistance seems to be 
circumscribed and delimited by his identification 
with the same aesthetics of the past that is more 
loyal to the logistics of perception than to the 
pollutions of speed.  This became particularly 
evident when I asked him to elaborate on his 
sense of the future of dance and performance, 
which have aggressively transformed themselves 
via the technological interface.  The context of 
my question was a statement he made in 
Cybermonde, a book highly reflexive about the 
performing arts, that theatrical "telepresence" 
delocalizes the position and situation of the 
body in a way that negates the here and now, "le 
hic et nunc," for what's happening, "le 
maintenant."  "Ici n'est plus," he writes in 
Cybermonde, "tout est maintenant."  Just how we 
might understand this temporal distinction 
between "le hiv et nunc" and "maintenant" becomes 
clearer when Virilio expresses his anxiety about 
current techno developments in dance, occasioned 
by his concern that "dance and theatre are arts 
of the "hic et nunc" and of "habeas corpus." 
These are arts that present the body.  That's 
their force.  Whether it's Cunningham or others, 
there's a tendency to perform (à faire danser) 
specters Š To remove the body of the actor or 
dance," he continues, "to replace it with a 
specter is the equivalent of transforming dance 
or theatre into a form of automation.  Why 
wouldn't one oppose the resistance of the body to 
these technical derivatives?  Particularly," he 
adds, "since the body is the very place of 
resistance.  Not simply an ideological 
resistance, but an ontological resistance. It's 
the essential nature of theatre and dance to 
present the body, not to telepresent it."

What's striking in these strident words is their 
commitment to an ontology of performance that's 
concomitant with the long history of classical 
theatre in France that is inscribed in the 
presence of the body and its framing in the 
unities of time and place, "hic et nunc."  I 
probably don't need to elaborate on the 
metaphysical and ideological implications of this 
tradition, from its grounding in the absolutist 
ballets of the Sun King to its reference to the 
Eucharistic body, which is presented in religious 
ritual as the "hic et nunc." 

To be fair to Virilio, he's also concerned with 
how the reductions of telepresence in speed and 
scale can have a negative impact on human agency. 
But I'm wondering whether Stelarc [who addressed 
the San Francisco gather via Second Life] might 
be one of the many artists who might have a 
different appreciation for the potential of 
miniaturization, as the interface of the 
performing body with the new media network might 
well extend our notions of the localized "hic" 
and the corporeal "nunc."   Just last spring, I 
sat in wonder while watching an animated 
conversation between Stelarc and Ashley 
Ferro-Murray, a choreographer now in Performance 
Studies at Berkeley, as they traded their 
expressions of excitement over how the condensed 
speed of censors and interactive technologies 
have sensitized them to the miniaturized 
movements of their corporeal digits and 
facialities in ways that have expanded the 
terrain of performance and realized the 
longstanding inscription of the body in its 
technological interface and horizon.  Their 
willingness to inhabit the accidents and 
pollutions of speed transforms performance from 
its ontological isolation in the unities of time 
and place and their stultifying ideological 
legacy by opening it to the accidents and 
uncertainties of resistance and its catastrophes.

I hope everyone will excuse me for this longish 
post, but Steve's opening words on museology 
prompted me to position these interests within 
the technological context of new media art.

Best,

Tim


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853