Meghan Trainor Building small scale models of the future

Meghan Trainor

Building small scale models of
          the future

Elba Gallagher
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi
narrative tool for research
& conceptual exploration

Son(net) Subterfuge, 2004

ITP,                               Theatrum Anatomicum,
New York                           Amsterdam

The Center Cannot Hold, 2005

PIRINEOS SUR World Music and Arts
Destival

a continuously evolving political film
presented as a performance of
audiovisual narratives in a live mixing
event.

[SIC] & Dan Perlin

APRIL 20, 2005

At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, then, [Paul] Virilio's
cultural theory is concerned with
what he calls the third, or, the
transplant revolution — the
almost total collapse of the
distinction between the human
body and technology.

John Armitage
Beyond Postmodernism? Paul
Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural
Theory

“Prosthetics, either medical or technical for
       enhancement, neural implantations, and
immersive environments and finally externalization
  of human intelligence with technical prosthetics
    constitute a set of situations where body, [or
   flesh], space, the machine and the medium of
 communication comprise an aesthetic system to
                    be discovered.”
        Ahmet Atıf Akın, Medium is The Flesh

Q: How is this aesthetic system experienced by the
                      viewer?

In a sense, stripping her [Aimee Mullins]
of her literal legs so that she can be
seen to rise to a higher level replicates
some of the most careless and ill-
thought-through philosophies of
disembodied technofetishism in which
discussion of posthumansinsm are
really little more than celebrations of
dehumanization.

Marquard Smith,
The Vulnerable Articulate: James
Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew
Barney

"The finger gloves are light. I can move
them without any effort. Feel, touch,
grasp anything, but keeping a certain
distance from the objects. The lever-
action of the lengthened fingers
intensifies the various sense-data of the
hand....I feel me touching, I see me
grasping, I control the distance between
me and the objects."

Rebecca Horn on "Finger Gloves," 1972

Embodied Gestures: Kinetic Prototype with EEG control

Embodied Gestures: return motion (machine control)

Embodied Gestures: Large tessellation opening gesture

The Cedar Fan: prototype

The Cedar Fan: testing the system

Rebecca Horn: Mechanical Body Fan performance

Cedar Fan: breathing gesture

Cedar Fan: sustained opening gesture

"What is a man’s eye but a machine for the little creature that sits
behind in his brain to look through?

A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for some time after the man
is dead. It is not the eye that cannot see, but the restless one that
cannot see through it.

Is it man’s eyes, or is it the big seeing-engine which has revealed to us
the existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity?

What has made man familiar with the scenery of the moon, the spots on
the sun, or the geography of the planets?

He is at the mercy of the seeing-engine for these things, and is
powerless unless he tack it on to his own identity, and make it part and
parcel of himself.

Or, again, is it the eye, or the little sea—engine which has shown us the
existence of infinitely minute organisms which swarm unsuspected
round us?"

             The Book of the Machines, Samuel Butler, 1873

“As yet the machines receive their impressions through
             the agency of man’s senses…”

                        Ibid.

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are
 all light and clean because they are nothing but
   signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a
   spectrum, and these machines are eminently
  portable, mobile – a matter of immense human
pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere
  near so fluid, being both material and opaque.
          Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.

  Donna J. Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1991

“… systems-oriented art… will deal less with artifacts
contrived from their formal value, and increasingly with
 men enmeshed with and within purposeful responsive
 systems. Such a change should gradually diminish the
    distinction between biological and non-biological
      systems, i.e. man and the system as similarly
 functioning but organizationally separate entities. The
      outcome will neither be the fragile cybernetic
   organisms now built nor the cumbersome electronic
    environments just coming into being. Rather, the
  system itself will be made intelligent and sensitive to
     the human invading its territorial and sensorial
                         domain."

 Jack Burnham, "The Future of Responsive Systems in
   Art," revisedversion published in Beyond Modern
                    Sculpture, p.363

“They variously trace the origins of immersive
 aesthetics back to panoramas, cabinets of curiosities,
  Baroque ceiling paintings, ancient frescos and even
 cave paintings. So rather than being completely new,
immersion seems to keep reappearing as an ideal, and
 often transcendental, form of human-representation
 and human-technology relationship. This fascination
  with immersion seems to indicate a human desire to
fuse with the immersive image-space or technology—a
     desire to become posthuman or transhuman.”

 Edwina Bartlem, Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive
              and Distributed Aesthetics

Q: How can immersive art be framed as experience that
              speaks to these origins?

“Once, most people thought that artificial-natural,
  human-machine, organic and constructed, were dualities
   just as central to living, but the figure of the cyborg has
revealed that it isn’t so. And perhaps this will cast some light
     on the general permanence and importance of these
      dualities. After all the cyborg lives only through the
   symbiosis of ostensible opposites always in tension. We
 know, from our bodies and from our machines, that tension
   is a great source of pleasure and power ... [As such, the
  cyborg metaphor challenges and moves beyond] dualistic
    epistemologies to the epistemology of cyborg: thesis,
         antithesis, synthesis, prosthesis. And again.”

  Chris Hables Gay, Heidi J. Figueroa- Sarriera, and Steven
                           Mentor

  Q: How can tension in these works be best harnessed to
              communicate to the audience?