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Bodies and Digital Utopia - Critical Essay

Art Journal, Winter, 2000 by Catherine Bernard

Our current relation to physical and social bodies betrays a deep uneasiness in our society, engendered by altered definitions of physical identity and increasing mediacentric behavior. Obsessive violence, the notion of invincibility, and recurring themes of the survival of the fittest in film and television combine with sensationalistic news reports of genetic progress and manipulation of human longevity, health, appearance, and reproduction to foster the concept of disposable bodies and physical reality. Cloning is an established fact; genetic engineering has become the stuff of newspaper headlines.

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The now famous predictions of Guy Debord in the late 1960S about a reality that would be transformed into a myriad of spectacles have proven true. [1] The continuous and tremendous impact of broadcasting technology has contributed to re-engineering our perception of physical reality as a soap opera, complete with logo, specific design, and commercial breaks. So, too, have communication networks turned into appendices to our lives, as faxes, modems, and email increase the dissociation from experienced physical reality.

Digital communications also promote an ideology of transcendence in regard to the plurality and diversity of cultures, politics, and histories that overcome space and time, offering the promise of an open space of equal exchange based upon a nonhierarchical structure. On the one hand, the creation of a global network and space without physical boundaries subverts unilateral systems of information by de facto opening transnational and transcultural connections, while on the other hand, it allows the restructuring of geo-political boundaries into an ever-expanding market of limitless access. The latter aspect demonstrates the shift away from the dominance of national economic and cultural interests that characterized modern capitalism into a next phase, that of postmodern, transnational pancapitalism. Pancapitalism better operates under the guise of a "global" identity, for which otherness is good as long as it offers new marketing concepts, distributed through the virtual corporate mall, aka the World Wide We b. Consider the staggering numbers that characterize the digital divide: in spite of the fact that electronic commerce is exploding and that more than 1.5 billion websites now crowd cyberspace, less than g percent of the world's population is now online. [2]

I would like to examine here the work of two artists' collectives that create a critical apparatus that assesses emerging definitions of body and space in the age of new media. Through performances and actions involving digital technology, Floating Point Unit Fakeshop and the Electronic Disturbance Theater address our shifting perceptions of physical and social bodies.

Digital Space/Physical Bodies

In the age of a new eugenic consciousness, physical bodies are cumbersome; their opacity is opposed to the transparence of the digital utopia that promotes a distance from experienced reality and a uniform space and time. The body and physical experiences are disruptive, because physical functions are both unpredictable and difficult to quantify. Within the digital economy, desire is given a privileged place, because it can be rerouted into consumerism. Body politics, then, need to be orchestrated within this frame of organized consumption and fabrication: fit bodies, perfect health, eugenic ideology, and neo-natal procedures organize the comprehension and use of the body within specific parameters.

Floating Point Unit is a New York--based group of artists working within the realm of new media technologies, with a special emphasis on distance performances and Internet broadcasting. The collective is composed of Jeff Gompertz, Bruno Ricard, and Vulcano, with special guest artist Prema Murthy and various collaborators. Floating Point Unit, along with its offspring Fakeshop, have addressed, in several Internet broadcast performances, the dematerialization and slow disappearance of the physical dimensions of our beings. Floating Point Unit also injects a poetic quality into the definition of space, in performances where multiple dimensions--live, broadcast, actual, and virtual--coalesce without necessarily destroying one another and reflect on the blurring of our perception of different levels of reality.

The group specifically raises the issue of the body as a place of physical and economic reconstruction. Such events as Observation Platform (1996), a live performance simultaneously broadcast on the Internet, emphasized the concept of voyeurism and desire. During the performance, ethereal composite bodies were constructed on-screen through the manipulation of digital images of actual bodies immersed in a tank of water, referencing both primal substance and the fluidity of digital space. It also addressed the notions of virtual versus physical presence and the blurring between spectacle and reality.

A recent performance by Fakeshop, Multiple_Dwelling (www.inch.com/floating and www.fakeshop.com/multiple_dwelling), presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 1999 in Linz and at the New York Fakeshop performance space in Brooklyn, combined an installation in a warehouse, complete with suspended platforms, wires and suspended bodies, real audio/video, and Internet broadcast through CU-SeeMe, a Web-based video conference system, used mainly for corporate meetings. The performers' bodies were scanned and the signals transmitted to network participants who sold and bought the performers' organs, redesigning their bodies on screen. Multiple_Dwelling presents the idea of reality as co-constructed between different subjectivities/categories. It also addresses the idea of the bio-economy of body parts, both legal and illegal, in the First and Third Worlds, which often translates into organ trafficking, and the concept of designer bodies as part of the new eugenic consciousness, at a time when the code s tructures of any living being can be adapted and transformed.

Bodies and Digital Utopia - Critical Essay

Art Journal, Winter, 2000 by Catherine Bernard

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