Transcript Interpassivity

INTERPASSIVITY
& THE PROSTHESIS OF EXPERIENCE IN
CONTEMPORARY FICTION, ART & THEORY
LOUIS ARMAND
Director, Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, UALK
Philosophy Faculty, Charles University
www.louis-armand.com
HOLY MOTORS
(dir. Leos Carax, 2012)
From the self-animated spirit to the “god
machine”: actor, alienation, obsolescence
1. Theatre of experience
2. Theatre of alienation
3. Theatre of auto-obsolescence
RE-EVOLUTION
(2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Standley Kubrik, 1968)
Heuristic ALgorithmic
In Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968), HAL—a highly advanced “artificial
intelligence”—murders the human crew of a spaceship
on a mission to Jupiter, a mission somehow linked to the
discovery, on the Earth’s moon, of a form of cosmic (and
only nominally artificial) intelligence—advanced beyond
human understanding—in the shape of a black monolith
heralding a form of a “cosmic” evolutionary event.
In 2010: The Odyssey Continues, humanity is restricted
to bearing witness to the emergence of a higher form of
intelligence in its very midst; an intelligence that precomprehends humanity’s future.
In 2001 computer scientists
like Marvin Minsky & Murray
Campbell argued that the
technology of constructing a
HAL 9000 computer
remained “science fiction”
due to the lack of
understanding of what
constitutes general
“intelligence.” This is
increasingly no longer the
case.
DE-EVOLUTION
Wintermute
AI self-evolution = informational critical
mass & complexity spontaneously giving
rise to autonomous actions
(Neuromancer, 1984)
AI Evolution = Human De-evolution
(Bank of America Merrill Lynch, 2015)
De-incentivisation
1997: IBM's super computer Deep Blue
defeated reigning world chess champion
Garry Kasparov
The “human challenge”:
Technology (prosthesis / substitute)
Extension of drive / Negation of drive
From utility (techne) to excess (poiesis):
from “thinking” machines to “creative” machines:
the ends of humanism
from “decentred” to “delegated” ego:
consciousness, language, technology, art,
politics (of “representation”)
from the extension of capability to the
replacement of capability
Pharmakon /
Prosthesis at the Origin
Plato, Phaedrus: writing as mnemotechnic (prosthesis of
memory), a cure for forgetfulness… vs. writing as
instrument of forgetfulness, as well as untruth, nonknowledge, etc., in contrast to speech…
The autonomy of writing vs speech: the prosthesis of
consciousness that threatens to “do away with us.”
Phaedrus = Genesis redux:
from logos (living speech, the “word-spirit”) to graphe
(writing as errent trait or “automaton”): the birth of
alienation, the symbolic order, interpassivity…
The Optical Unconscious
Analytic Machine Aesthetics
Eliot Elisofon, Marcel Duchamp Descends
Staircase, 1952.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a
Staircase, 1911.
Synaesthesia
Samuel Morse, Telegraph (1832)
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen on 8 November 1895, produced & detected
electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays
INTEGRATED MACHINES
Chicago meat cannery 1878
Etienne Marey, Motion Study 2, 1878
Childworker, replacing bobbins in a textile mill
Muybridge, Descending a Staircase 1884
THE ANALYTIC IMAGE
& THE OPTICAL UNCONSCIOUS
Frank & Lillian Gilbreth, Motion Studies, 1890s
From “Mirror Stage” to “Materialist
definition of consciousness”
(Jacques Lacan, 1949; 1954)
“What gives consciousness its
seeming primordial character?”
“If there is consciousness of
something it cannot be, we are
told, that this consciousness
does not, itself, grasp itself as
such. Nothing can be
experienced without the
subject being able to be aware
of himself within this
experience in a kind of
immediate reflection”
“I think where I am not,
therefore I am where I do not
think.”
“the symbolic world is the
world of the machine”
“in as much as he is committed
to a play of symbols, to a
symbolic world … man is a
decentred subject”
Ego in the Mirror
“Once again we’re dealing with a mirror.
“What is left in the mirror? The rays which return to the mirror make us locate
in an imaginary space the object which moreover is somewhere in reality.
The real object isn’t the object that you see in the mirror. So here there’s a
phenomenon of consciousness as such. That at any rate is what I would like
you to accept, so that I can tell you a little apologue to aid your reflection.
“Suppose all men have disappeared from the world. I say men on account of
the high value which you attribute to consciousness. That is already enough
to raise the question—What is left in the mirror? But let us take it to the point
of supposing that all living beings have disappeared. There are only
waterfalls and springs left—lightning and thunder too. The image in the
mirror, the image in the lake—do they still exist?”
Camera as prosthesis of “reflection” (cogitare me cogitare): the “gaze” of the other, of
the symbolic operation of consciousness vis-à-vis the “mirror stage” … *Like the old
Soviet joke, “mirror sees you.”
“Computing Machinery &
Intelligence” (Alan Turing, 1950)
“What would it mean
if machines could
think?” (Turing)
“If a lion could speak
we would not
understand it”
(Wittgenstein)
In a well-known article entitled “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), Turing
considered the question of what it would mean
for a machine to be intelligent in terms of the
human-machine problem.
“I propose,” wrote Turing, “to consider the
question ‘Can machines think?’” But this
reconsideration, Turing explained, “should begin
with definitions of the meaning of the terms
‘machine’ and ‘think.’”
Imitation Game
In order to arrive at such definitions, Turing proposed what he termed “the
imitation game,” otherwise known as the Turing test, which sets out criteria
for determining if a computer programme may be perceived as having
“intelligence.”
If a computer, on the basis of its written replies to questions, could not be
distinguished from a human respondent, then ‘fair play’ would oblige one to
say that it must be thinking.”
In other words, according to Turing’s proposition, a computer-respondent is
“intelligent” if the human subject is able to be convinced that its respondent
is, like the interrogator, also a human being, and not a machine.
“The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too
meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of
the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered
so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without
expecting to be contradicted.”
“Are there imaginable digital computers
which would do well in the imitation
game?” (Turing)
Are there humans who would not do well
at the imitation game? What is the
relationship between the “performance of
intelligence,” “empathy,” and “affect”?
Where lie the limits of simulation?
Voigt-Kampf Test
(Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, 1982)
Deckard: You’re reading
a magazine. You
come across a fullpage nude photo of a
girl…
Rachel: Is this to test
whether I’m a
Replicant or a
lesbian, Mr Deckard?
Electronic Brains
The field of “artificial intelligence” (AI), founded
at the Dartmouth conference in 1956 by Claude
Shannon, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and
others, derives from the hypothesis of “machine
intelligence” conceived of by Turing as a type of
binary calculator in the 1930s and whose design
logic underlay the prototype of one of the first
“actual” computers — the ACE, or Automatic
Computing Engine (Turing’s “electronic brain”)
— built at the National Physics Laboratory in
London shortly after World War Two.
The “ACE”
The Bletchley Park
COLLOSUS, 1944
From “agency” to “obsolescence”:
defining “Interpassivity”
Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the
Retreat of the Big Other” (1998)
Interpassivity as prosthesis of experience
= the uncanny situation in which one is “active” while transposing onto the Other
the unbearable passivity of one’s Being.
The active state of the dreamer (the dreamer “dreams,” but responsibility for the
dream, its direction etc., belongs elsewhere: it appears to be the work of an
Other who has constructed it for us and understands its meaning)
Interpassivity therefore masks the reality that it is only ever the other who
experiences (there is no act of delegation);
just as the “subject” is in reality a prosthesis of the Other (of the “Other’s desire”)
Experience as
fundamental fantasy
from “the Other does it for me, instead of me, in my place” to “I myself am
doing it through the Other”
“There is in fact no active free agent without this fantastic support, without
this Other Scene in which he or she is totally manipulated by the Other.”
It is therefore not the REAL but rather the fundamental FANTASY that
represents the inaccessible domain of experience…
The subject as “subjection to the signifier” is therefore an expression of the
Other’s “discourse”: the assumption of agency corresponds to the
assumption of a signifier (which is to say, of differing-deferral around a
generalised locus of “signification”)
“I can BELIEVE through the Other, but I cannot KNOW through the Other”
(the analogical dilemma?)
TELETECHNOLOGIES
The word television comes
from Ancient Greek τῆλε (tèle),
meaning "far", and Latin visio,
meaning "sight"
Pope Pius XII designated mid13th century St Clare patron
saint of television in 1958 (on
the basis that once when she
was too ill to attend Mass, she
reportedly saw & heard it on
the wall of her room)
John Logie Baird January 26th,
1926, demonstrates a viable
television system
In 1927, Baird transmitted
a signal over 438 miles
(705 km) of telephone line
between London and
Glasgow.
In 1928, Baird's company
(Baird Television
Development
Company/Cinema
Television) broadcast the
first transatlantic television
signal, between London
and New York, and the first
shore-to-ship transmission.
Brainstorm (1984)
VIRTUAL REALITY
Virtual Reality (VR),
sometimes referred to as
immersive multimedia,
is a computer-simulated
environment that can
simulate physical
presence in places in the
real world or imagined
worlds. Virtual reality can
recreate sensory
experiences, which
include virtual taste, sight,
smell, sound, and touch.
Brainstorm, 1981
The uses of mental prostheses:
Sex, Power, Knowledge, Perversion
Hyperreality
In his 1981 essay, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ Jean Baudrillard
outlines the following successive phases of the “image”:
1.
2.
3.
4.
it is the reflection of a basic reality
it masks and perverts a basic reality
it masks the absence of a basic reality
it bears no relation to any basic reality whatsoever:
it is its own pure simulacrum.
This is what Baudrillard terms the ‘hyperreal.’ In a media-saturated
age, the ‘media event’ constitutes its own reality, which is allpervasive. There is no escape from this ‘desert of the real.’
Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord (1967)
The whole life of those societies in
which modern conditions of production
prevail presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. All that
once was directly lived has become
mere representation. (§1)
The spectacle is not a collection of
images; rather, it is a social relationship
between people that is mediated by
images. (§4)
The spectacle cannot be understood as
an abuse of the world of vision, as a
product of the techniques of mass
dissemination of images. It is, rather, a
Weltanschauung which has become
actual, materially translated. It is a
world vision which has become
objectified. (§5)
The spectacle presents itself
as something enormously
positive, indisputable and
inaccessible. It says nothing
more than “that which appears
is good, that which is good
appears.” The attitude which it
demands in principle is
passive acceptance which in
fact it already obtained by its
manner of appearing without
reply, by its monopoly of
appearance. (§12)
Where the real world changes
into simple images, the simple
images become real beings
and effective motivations of
hypnotic behaviour… (§18)
The spectacle is the existing
order’s uninterrupted discourse
about itself, its laudatory
monologue. It is the selfportrait of power in the epoch
of its totalitarian management
of the conditions of
existence… (§24)
ALIENATION
Separation is the alpha and
omega of the spectacle… The
modern spectacle… expresses
what society can do, but in this
expression the permitted is
absolutely opposed to the
possible. (§24)
The economic system founded on
isolation is a circular production of
isolation. The technology is based
on isolation, and the technical
process isolates in turn. From the
automobile to television, all the
goods selected by the spectacular
system are also its weapons for a
constant reinforcement of the
conditions of isolation of “lonely
crowds.” The spectacle constantly
rediscovers its own assumptions
more concretely. (§28)
The worker does not produce
himself; he produces an
independent power. The success
of this production, its abundance,
returns to the producer as an
abundance of dispossession. All
the time and space of his world
become foreign to him with the
accumulation of his alienated
products. The spectacle is the
map of this new world, a map
which exactly covers its territory.
The very powers which escaped
us show themselves to us in all
their force. (§31)
The spectacle within society
corresponds to a concrete
manufacture of alienation. (§32)
Separated from his product, man
himself produces all the details of
his world with ever increasing
power, and thus finds himself ever
more separated from his world.
The more his life is now his
product, the more he is separated
from his life. (§33)
The spectacle is capital to such a
degree of accumulation that it
becomes an image. (§34)
MATRIX
“mass consensual
hallucination”
“a graphic representation of
data abstracted from the banks
of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace of the
mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city
lights, receding…”
William Gibson,
NEUROMANCER [1984]
MICROSOFT
One of the key concepts introduced in
Neuromancer is the microsoft, a small
piece of electronics inserted into a
socket connected to the brain.
“Her destination was one of the
dubious software rental complexes that
lined Memory Lane... The clientele
were young, few of them out of their
teens. They all seemed to have carbon
sockets planted behind the left ear, but
she didn't focus on them. The counters
that fronted the booths displayed
hundreds of slivers of microsoft,
angular fragments of colored silicon
mounted under oblong transparent
bubbles on squares of white cardboard
... Behind [one] counter a boy with a
shaven head stared vacantly into
space, a dozen spikes of microsoft
protruding from the socket behind his
ear.”
BrainGate is a brain implant system
built by Cyberkinetics, designed to
help those who have lost control of
their limbs, or other bodily functions,
from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(ALS) or spinal cord injury.
PANOPTICON (1791)
A time-space machine
The architecture of an idea
A weightless paradigm
An ideological apparatus
A GOD machine
THE “ALL-SEEING” EYE
An architectural figure that "incorporates a tower
central to an annular building that is divided into
cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of
the building to allow inner and outer windows.
The occupants of the cells . . . are thus backlit,
isolated from one another by walls, and subject
to scrutiny both collectively and individually by
an observer in the tower who remains unseen."
Foucault, Discipline & Punish
ARCHITECTURE OF POWER
According to Foucault, the new visibility or
surveillance afforded by the Panopticon
was of two types: The synoptic and the
analytic. The Panopticon, in other words,
was designed to ensure a “surveillance
which would be both global and
individualizing” – just as it represented a
system of power that is everywhere
visible but nowhere verifiable.
MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS
The PANOPTICON was not so
much envisaged as a kind of
building, but as a machine – a
conceptual machine – capable
of manufacturing
“consciousness” – a
prototypical ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
Anticipating DARWIN’s (and
later FREUD’s) homeostatic
notions of environmental “selfregulation,” Bentham’s
PANOTICON points to a
strictly “materialist” idea of
“consciousness” & behaviour.
UTILITARIANISM
The PANOPTICON operates on the basis
of an “asymmetry of seeing-without-beingseen.” It’s architecture is designed in such
a way as to constitute the supervising
awareness of this operation. It is nothing
short of a kind of SUPER-EGO whose role
is to implant itself in its subject and thus
both modify & produce the subject’s “own”
consciousness.
NEWTONIAN MACHINES
Architectures for a mechanistic
universe: Etienne Boullee, Project for
a Cenotaph for Newton, 1784
CRYSTAL PALACE
Between 1933 and 1936
the most extensive
television complex in
Europe was located
beneath the main
concourse at the Crystal
Palace in London,
instigated by Baird, incl.
high definition television
broadcast transmitters,
receivers, cathode ray
tubes, microwave relay
systems, photocells,
magnetrons and telecine
equipment
Paxton, 1851
The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron &
plate-glass building originally erected in
Hyde Park, London, England, to house
the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than
14,000 exhibitors from around the world
gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square
feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to
display examples of the latest technology
developed in the Industrial Revolution.
Designed by Joseph Paxton, it was 1,851
feet (564 m) long, with an interior height
of 128 feet (39 m). Because of the recent
invention of the cast plate glass method
in 1848, which allowed for large sheets of
cheap but strong glass, it was at the time
the largest amount of glass ever seen in
a building & astonished visitors with its
clear walls & ceilings that did not require
interior lights, thus a "Crystal Palace".
Galerie des machines (1889-1910)
A pavilion built for the Exposition
Universelle in Paris, designed by
Victor Contamin; made of iron,
steel & glass, it was by far the
largest vaulted building to have yet
been built.
The Galerie des machines formed
a huge glass and metal hall with an
area of 115 by 420 metres (377 by
1,378 ft) and a height of 48.324
metres (158.54 ft). There were no
internal supports.
Its most extensive exhibit was that
of Thomas Edison's 493
inventions.
Weightless Architecture
Comprising enormous
steel arches whose supports
seemed hardly to be fixed to the
ground at all, the Galerie
des Machines bore greater
resemblance to an enormous
engine room than to a traditional
building, and was referred to at the
time as a “disconcerting industrial
cathedral.”
Eiffel Tower
In the 1890s “the
most spectacular
thing about the
Eiffel Tower, was
not the view of the
Tower from the
ground. It was
seeing the ground
from the Tower.”
Robert Hughes
PANOPTICAL AESTHETICS
When the tower opened in
1899 thousands rode the
300m up in the elevators to
take in the panoramic,
aerial view, in which the
“once invisible roofs & now
clear labyrinths of alleys &
streets” became suddenly
available to the eyes of
these new observers, and
Paris became, as Robert
Hughes says, “a map of
itself, a new type of
landscape [...] based on
frontality & pattern, rather
than on perspective
recession & depth.”
SIMULTANEISME
Along with the experience of
locomotive travel,
telecommunications and mass
media, the new revolutionary
architecture of the sky had a major
impact upon the way people
perceived the world. Not only the
objects in the world, but the very
manner in which the world was
experienced: “whose basic element
is simultaneity and whose nature
consists in the spatialising of the
temporal element” (Arnold Hauser).
For writers like Apollinaire & Blaise
Cendrars, simultaneisme applied to
the experience of modern life
generally.
Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien
et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913)
with Sonia Delauney
MACHINES FOR LIVING
Le Corbusier
Unité d’habitation, 1960s
MODULOR
INTEGRATED PLANNING
From MICRROCOSM (“unité”) to MACROCOSM (the “radiant city”)
The “geometry of thought”
Geodesics / Synergetics / Dymaxionism (Buckminster Fuller)
ENVIRON / MENTALISM
From MICROCOSM to MACROCOSM,
the abstraction of the universal in the
individual & the ECOLOGICAL view.
 Gregory Bateson, “ecology of mind”
Reason  Abstraction  Discipline 
Organisation  Production  Efficiency
Cybernetics
(The Human Use of Human Machines, Norbert Wiener, 1950)
Systems of communication and control…
Materiality. Pattern recognition.
Information. Symbolic machines.
Dynamic systems. Organisation.
Programmatics.
Technicity: the technological condition of
all dynamic systems
Gutenberg Galaxy (1454/1962)
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man (1962) by Marshall
McLuhan analyzes the effects of mass
media on human consciousness.
Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the
message," McLuhan argues that print
technologies are the means by which
people are re-invented. The invention of
movable type was the decisive in the
change from a culture in which all the
senses partook of a common interplay to a
tyranny of the visual. He argued that the
printing press led to the creation of
nationalism, rationalism, automatisation,
and standardisation.
Movable type, with its ability to reproduce
texts accurately & swiftly, extended the
drive toward homogeneity and repeatability.
The Gutenberg Press was thus the
prototypical AUTOMATED PRODUCTION
LINE.
TAYLORISM & THE BIRTH OF
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
Evolution of time and
motion study into a
technique for improving
work methods & systems.
The challenge of
reconciling “open-ended”
industrial progress with
humanism.
Final integration of “man”
and “machine”
Integrated Assembly Line
The Ford Model T was produced by
Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from
October 1, 1908, to May 26, 1927.
It was the first automobile massproduced on moving assembly lines
with completely interchangeable parts,
marketed to the middle class.
“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will
be large enough for the family, but small
enough for the individual ... It will be
constructed of the best materials, by the best
men to be hired, after the simplest designs that
modern engineering can devise. But it will be
so low in price that no man making a good
salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy
with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure
in God's great open spaces.” Henry Ford
Hollerith
Auschwitz
Buckenwald
Ravensbruck
ANALYTIC ENGINES
The Analytical Engine was a
proposed mechanical general-purpose
computer designed by Charles
Babbage. It was first described in 1837
and was a direct antecedent of
Turing’s ‘Universal Machine.’
The input (programs & data) was
provided via punched cards, a method
used at the time to direct mechanical
looms such as the Jacquard loom. For
output, the machine had a printer, a
curve plotter and a bell. The machine
was able to punch numbers onto cards
to be read in later, as a possible
feedback mechanism using methods of
“The Analytic Engine has no pretensions
“branching” & “looping.”
whatever to originate anything. It can do
whatever we know how to order it to
perform.” Ada Byron
MECHANICAL BRIDE
Desiring Machines: the integration of the
“organic” & “technical” through selfpropagation…
The term AUTOPOIESIS was introduced in 1972
by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining
chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept
has been also applied to the fields of systems
theory and sociology.
“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized
… as a network of processes of production … of
components which: (i) through their interactions
& transformations continuously regenerate &
realize the network of processes … that
produced them; & (ii) constitute it (the machine)
as a concrete unity in space in which they (the
components) exist by specifying the topological
domain of its realization as such a network.”
From Automation to Automaton
The centrifugal governor,
which dates to the last quarter
of the 18th century, was used
to adjust the gap between
millstones. The centrifugal
governor was also used in the
automatic flour mill developed
by Oliver Evans in 1785,
making it the first completely
automated industrial process.
The governor was adopted by
James Watt for use on a steam
engine in 1788 after Watt’s
partner Boulton saw one at a
flour mill Boulton & Watt were
building
MAXWELL’S DEMON
The governor received
relatively little scientific
attention until James Clerk
Maxwell published a paper that
established the theoretical
basis for control theory.
Development of the electronic
amplifier during the 1920s,
which was important for long
distance telephony, required a
higher signal to noise ratio,
which was solved by negative
feedback noise cancellation.
This and other telephony
applications contributed to
control theory. The word
"automation" itself was coined
in the 1940s by General
Electric.
ROBOTS
Hugo Ball, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rosum’s
Universal Robot’s; 1920); in which the
term 'robot' was first used to denote
fictional automata.
FETISH MACHINE
Metropolis dir Fritz Lang (1927)
ANDROIDS
Many ancient mythologies include
artificial people, such as the
mechanical servants built by the Greek
god Hephaestus. Leonardo da Vinci
sketched plans for a humanoid robot
around 1495. In France, between 1738
and 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson
exhibited several life-sized automata: a
flute player, a pipe player & a duck.
In 1939, the humanoid robot known as
Elektro debuted at the 1939 New York
World's Fair. Seven feet tall (2.1 m) &
weighing 265 pounds (120.2 kg), it
could walk by voice command, speak
about 700 words (using a 78-rpm
record player), smoke cigarettes, blow
up balloons, & move its head & arms.
The body consisted of a steel gear,
cam & motor skeleton covered by an
aluminum skin.
Elektro the Moto-Man & his Little Dog Sparko
GOLEMS
In Jewish folklore, a golem
(meaning “unshaped form”)
is an animated
anthropomorphic being,
magically created entirely
from inanimate matter. The
most famous golem was
supposedly created by Judah
Loew ben Bezalel, the late16th-century rabbi of Prague,
as a general servant &
defender of the ghetto.
Ken Russell, Lisztomania (1975)
FEMBOTS
1976 episode of The Bionic Woman called Kill
Oscar, featuring the Fembots, robot killer-spies
REPLICANTS
“Early in the 21st Century, the
tyrell corporation advanced Robot
evolution into the nexus phase – a
being virtually identical to a
human – known as a Replicant.
The nexus 6 Replicants were
superior in strength and agility,
and at least equal in intelligence,
to the genetic engineers who
created them.
Replicants were used Off-world as
slave labor, in the hazardous
exploration and colonization of
other planets.”
BLADE RUNNER, dir. Ridley
Scott (1982).
“Replicants are
like any other
machine.
They’re either
a benefit or a
hazard. If
they’re a
benefit, it’s not
my problem.”
Posthumanism
The story is usually told from the perspective of
a hero who gradually makes the horrifying
discovery that all the people around him are not
really human beings but some kind of
automatons, robots, who only look and act like
real human beings; the final point of these
stories is of course the hero’s discovery that he
himself is also such an automaton and not a real
human being.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
CYBORG
“The cyborg does not dream of
community on the model of the
organic family… The cyborg would
not recognise the Garden of Eden; it
is not made of mud and cannot dream
of returning to dust.”
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’
STELARC
Integrated Body
STELARC, “Ping Body” 1996
"During the Ping Body
performances, what is being
considered is a body moving
not to the promptings of
another body in another place,
but rather to Internet activity
itself - the body's
proprioception & musculature
stimulated not by its internal
nervous system but by the
external ebb and flow of data.
By random pinging (or
measuring the echo times) to
Internet domains it is possible
to map spatial distance &
transmission time to body
motion.”
Totemic Operator
The Totemic Operator
represents a “conceptual
apparatus which filters
unity through multiplicity,
multiplicity through unity;
diversity through identity,
identity through diversity.”
(Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind)
EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES
EXTRA EAR 1997-
RECONFIGURING
Stelarc: "The body is an evolutionary
architecture that operates and becomes
aware in the world. To alter it's architecture
is to adjust it's awareness.
The body has always been a prosthetic
body, one augmented by its instruments
and machines. Issues of identity and
alternate, intimate and involuntary
experiences of the body, as well as the
telematic scaling of experience, are
explored in recent performances…
What becomes important is not merely the
body's identity, but its connectivity - not its
mobility or location, but its interface.
BLENDER (Stelarc & Nina Sellars, 2005)
1.6 metres high and “anthropormorphic” in scale and
structure. Every few minutes Blender automatically
circulated or “blended” these bio-materials via a
system of compressed air pumps and a pneumatic
actuator. The mixture included 4.6 litres of
subcutaneous fat taken from Stelarc’s torso and Nina
Sellars’ limbs, zylocain (local anaesthetic), adrenalin,
O+ blood, sodium bicarbonate, peripheral nerves,
saline solutions and connective tissue.
RECOMBINANT DNA
•
•
•
DNA was first isolated by Swiss
physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869.
The idea of recombinant DNA was
first proposed by Peter Lobban in the
Biochemistry Department at
Stanford. The first successful
production and intracellular
replication of recombinant DNA
occurred in 1972.
Recombinant DNA (rDNA) are DNA
molecules formed by laboratory
methods of genetic recombination
(such as cloning) to bring together
genetic material from multiple
sources, creating sequences that
would not otherwise be found in
biological organisms. Recombinant
DNA is possible because DNA
molecules from all organisms share
the same chemical structure. They
differ only in the nucleotide sequence
within that identical overall structure.
CYBERFLESH GIRLMONSTER
(Linda Dement, 1995)
The artist invited 30
women to “donate” parts
of their bodies, which
were scanned to create
both visual & auditory
analogues. From these,
conglomerate “bodies”
were assembled,
animated and made
interactive, becoming part
of an ongoing
morphological process.
Videodrome
(dir. David Cronenberg, 1983)
“Death to the Real! Long live the New
Flesh!”
Videodrome was described by Andy
Warhol as “A Clockwork Orange of the
’80s.”
It is an investigation into the ideological
coding of reality and of individual
behaviour mediated by the omniprescence
of TV and video culture, in which image is
inextricable from signal or command
(medium and message).
In Cronenberg’s film, “Videodrome” is a
metaphor for the evolved “materialisation”
of the virtual: what William Gibson called
“the Matrix” and what Jeremy Bentham
called “the Panopticon.”
INFLUENCING
MACHINES
Viktor Tausk, 1912
“In his quite original work
with psychotic patients,
Tausk was the first to
formulate the important
concept of ‘ego
boundaries’; and he was
also the first to introduce
the term ‘identity’ into
psychoanalytic literature,
in his paper on the
‘influencing machine’ in
schizophrenia.”
Paul Roazen, ‘A Curious Triangle: Freud, Lou
Andreas-Salomé, & Victor Tausk,’ Encounter
XXIII.4 (October 1969): 3-8.
“Fantasy is a basic scenario filling out
the empty space of a fundamental
impossibility, a screen masking a void.”
“Fantasy conceals the fact that the
Other, the symbolic order, is
structured… around something which
cannot be symbolised.” (Žižek)
eXistenZ
(dir. David Cronenberg, 1999)
A reprise of Videodrome, where interactive gaming has taken the place of
video. The plot involves two competing games consol manufacturers –
Antenna Research and Cortical Systematics – and an anti-gaming
movement of “realists,” opposed to the “deforming” of reality. The viewer is
left suspended in uncertainty as to what constitutes the “game” and what
constitutes “reality,” or whether the real itself is an extension of the game;
that there is, in effect, no escape.
The film obscures any clear distinction between the organic and technology,
the real and the artificial. Gamers jack into their consoles through bio ports,
by which the game “pod” is connected by an “UmbyCord” directly with the
player’s nervous system. (What Gibson called “biosoft.”) The “pod” operates
as a type of prosthetic consciousness; an externalized representation of
subjective “agency” or Ego. Players’ actions are dictated by the characters
they play and the situations in which they find themselves rather than being
autonomous agents. The game itself is a type of desiring machine,
producing a complex of symptoms in which the competing fantasy systems
and the ‘real’ are coded, distorted, concealed, displaced.
As a result, the only ‘basic reality’ open to experience is that of the
paranoiac.
Gamespace
“Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and
useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose
rules you can’t remember? Ever get the fierce desire to
quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there’s no
umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can
announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread
that while you have no choice but to play the game, you
can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever
suspect that you don’t even know who your real
opponent might be? … Welcome to gamespace.”
(McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, 2007)
Physical Control of the Mind:
Toward a Psychocivilised Society
(José Delgado, 1971)
“We need a programme of psychosurgery for political control of our society.
The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from
the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
“The individual may think that the most important reality is his own
existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical
perspective.
“Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal
orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain.
Someday, armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of
the brain.”
José Delgado, Congressional Record 118.26 (1974): 4475.
Two girls who were suffering from
epileptic seizures and
behavioural disturbances
requiring implantation of
electrodes in the brain for
diagnostic and therapeutic
purposes. Under the cap, each
patient wears a “stimoceiver,”
used to stimulate the brain by
radio and to send electrical
signals of brain activity by
telemetry while the patients are
completely free within the
hospital ward.
From José Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind, 1971
THE END