A Relay of Joy: An Artist and a Geographer Reflect upon Cybernetic Assemblies and an Embodied Digital Media Geography of Spatkapitalismus (2010) (original) (raw)
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Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 2010
Perhaps it was the emergence of global media geographies of Spätkapitalismus (Late Capitalism) which provoked Deleuze and Guattari in their collaborative text Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) to claim that 'the schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there is.' However with the proliferation of digital technology, it is now possible to explore the schizoid disassociation between modern and 'hyper-global' conceptions of time and space in artistic and inventive manners. This paper will discuss in the context of current critical and geographical thought the performance of a cybernetic assembly A Relay of Joy. Utilizing the faculties of aurality and tactility for playing sounds in response to marks placed on a sheet of paper. The user rendered as a Beckettian figure is hooded, so the sound relays the location of the mark, assisting coordination. The intention is to draw a face through a process of mental mapping that emerges in response to sound rather than sight. The implications of this device are strange, as initially it is difficult to work out what is happening. Using the machine, the user is locked into a cybernetic assembly, or an "abstract machine." Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the ' abstract machine' comprises further abstractions of the body as a fragmented form. The machine deals with the abstractions of sound, stripping out sight in an attempt to locate a face that's going to emerge from touch. The sense impressions are perverted: it's a deliberate ill effect that turns the machine, as the crisis of late capitalist modernity turns in the subject.
From Psychogeography to Cybertopology: Situating “Place” in the Disoriented Dérive
The psychogeographic 1 [1] experience of drifting through an urban landscape without purpose, guided by the shifting rhythms of random and selective attraction is a wellknown 'subversive' aesthetic initiated by several European artist/activist groups in the 1950's. They merged for a short time to become the Situationist International (SI) in 1957. Their drifting practice, the dérive 2 [2] has subsequently become a common referent in contemporary locative media projects that mix performance tactics with new media technologies in predominantly urban settings. Originally the connotations of an urban dérive alluded to both the poverty and potential of "everyday life;" privileging the unpredictable over the routine and habitual; play over work; disorientation over orientation. The city, as a field of dynamically changing situations, hosted both the pseudoworld of the spectacle explored by Guy Debord and the potential utopian playground advanced by Constant Nieuwenhuys. A Situationist ontology fuels many locative media projects and online multi-player ecologies. The perception and performance of place in each of these genres, from a dérive point of view, elicits a topology of the in-between. Place becomes a topological rhythm between Euclidean and non-Euclidean space, between our actual perception of the 3D world and a virtual proprioceptive experience of movement through it. The politically reverberant psychogeographies advanced by Debord, accelerated some 50 plus years, are updated to become affective topologies and are now folded into the confounding economic complexities of a late capitalism powered by the very tactics and ethos once meant to overthrow it.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argued that aggression is the root of internal psychic dissonance, driven by unconscious fantasies deriving from the body at birth. This Kleinian way of thought found expression through eccentric works of art made in the 1960s that delineate the relationship between the body and the machine. Mechanistic violence and aggression is conjured through the work of Lee Lozano and Louise Bourgeois, in whose work gendered bodily form interacts with industrialization, emphasising and critiquing the proximity of human and technology. Subsequent to the era of the sixties, performance of the machine/body beyond the traditional grid by Rebecca Horn and Tishan Hsu further integrated and embraced the android in modern culture. These psychically charged works obfuscate the boundaries of object, body, and machine, and serve to highlight the limits of how humanity is defined. Categories that possess varying degrees of agency are then rendered interchangeable, as new technologies are adapted. These “threatening, possibly functioning objects” as Donald Judd once stated, find their absurdity somewhere in the middle of the mechanic and the organic. When viewing the body/machine, it is essential to consider both labour and production values. Therefore capitalism and its effects on domesticity and gender roles is also a principal theme to examine. In this essay, I will explore how the body can exist as both machine and home, and the absurdity represented by the non-mutually exclusive dichotomy of the image of the sometimes violent body/machine, or cyborg, hybrid. I will argue that the conditions of the erotic yet aggressive body are susceptible to mechanised oxymorons and capitalist objectification, examined here through the use of the humorous and absurd in these works.
Cybernetics and Human Knowing: A Journal of Second-Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis and Cybersemiotics, 2021
Ksenia Fedorova's monograph, Tactics of Interfacing: Encoding Affect in Art and Technology, is a new entry in The MIT Press's Leonardo book series. It is an erudite, insightful, and sympathetic philosophical exploration of affective phenomena. Deeply thoughtful and well-paced, this book will call upon the reader to contemplate its contents long after they turn the last page. Tactics of Interfacing is thematically organized, with each chapter standing on its own and building upon one another, as Fedorova asks questions about intersubjectivity and selfhood through differing relations between affective phenomena and interface technologies. Topics addressed include: the face as a medium shared by both humans and machines; body image and the embodiment as well as algorithmizing of this image; the role that technologies play in transforming the relation between self and other; and, how the embodied self is situated within an environment. Collectively, these chapters offer an excellent, breathtaking exploration into the interface, which Fedorova importantly approaches "not so much as technology, but as a condition that brings to the fore and gives structure to the relational nature of being human" [p. 3]. A technopositivist meditation, Fedorova's Tactics of Interfacing belongs to what I would call the essayist tradition of media philosophy. That is, each of the individual chapters takes the form of an argumentative essay on a different but related topic, providing objective analyses as well as appraisal opinions. This anthology style is overall consistent with Anglo-American visual studies, as well as German-speaking bildwissenschaft (image science), and their immediate disciplinary progenitors (Rampley, 2012), as exemplified by the works of McLuhan, Mitchell, and Sontag, as well as Boehm, Kittler, and Warburg, among others. Also similar to such thinkers, Fedorova does not position her work "as an art historical investigation" [p. 5] in the traditional sense. Rather, Tactics of Interfacing is a philosophical study of cultural practices in which art serves "as a lens that brings together diverse philosophical and media conceptions of the aesthetic and ethical aspects of technologies' impacts" [p. 5]. Viewing her subject through the looking glass of Western phenomenological and political philosophy, Fedorova primarily focuses on Agamben, Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. While at one and the same time, she also takes into consideration a variety of ideas from the behavioral and brain sciences, computer sciences, and semiotic sciences.
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Perhaps it was the emergence of global media geographies of Spatkapitalismus (Late Capitalism) which provoked Deleuze and Guattari in their collaborative text AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) to claim that ‘the schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there is.’ However with the proliferation of digital technology, it is now possible to explore the schizoid disassociation between modern and ‘hyperglobal’ conceptions of time and space in artistic and inventive manners. This paper will discuss in the context of current critical and geographical thought the performance of a cybernetic assembly A Relay of Joy. Utilizing the faculties of aurality and tactility for playing sounds in response to marks placed on a sheet of paper. The user rendered as a Beckettian figure is hooded, so the sound relays the location of the mark, assisting coordination. The intention is to draw a face through a process of mental mapping that emerges in response to sound rather than sight. The impli...
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