Body Degree Zero: Anatomy of an Interactive Performance

Machine modes of representation are sometimes thought of as being supremely abstract. In practice, these modes counterpose abstraction and realism, artifice and naturalism, in ways that have problematized the artistic debate, destabilizing traditional and conventional ways of seeing and thinking. Similarly, the body has been positioned at the intersection of many discourses – cultural, scientific and artistic – and finds itself subject to de-configuration. The body has become a site of self-destruction – no longer a stable physical entity but an indeterminate mass of fluctuating data in continual transformation that destroys itself even as it is remade. This paper examines these issues in the work of the art and science collaboration, the Einstein’s Brain Project. Index Terms — Art, visualization, virtual reality, interactive computing I. WHICH OF MY SELVES Within the context of European and North American art practices, the twentieth century has witnessed a deconfiguration of the image beginning with Impressionism, the Cubists, the Expressionists, and including a variety of Abstract styles. Running parallel to artistic movements it is also evident that deconfiguration has occurred within the context of literature, noticeable in poetry. Deconfiguration comprises the break up of surfaces the decomposition into smaller, often disjunctive fragments. Image deconfiguration is also a resulting product of the twentieth century technological inventions of television and computer screens. Recent tools and representational devices have had a tremendous impact on the way in which the world is visually constructed and also in its future visual construction. What is noticeable over the last twenty years is the influence of technological methods of representation on the world of science. In the areas of bioscience and neurology, it has now become possible to fabricate many complex models and simulations of the body and brain, which were once thought of as impossible. Technological invention has not only influenced the way in which the body and brain are visualized but what is perhaps more important is that it has predisposed the way in which the body and brain are conceptualized. Networks, codes and the virtual have become common currency. In ‘A Dialectic of Centuries”, Dick Higgins, co-founder of Fluxus and Something Else Press, acknowledges a profound shift in artistic consciousness: The cognitive questions asked by most artists in the 20th Century are; How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? The post-cognitive questions since then are: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? II. MIMESIS AND DISTANCIATION During the past decade, much hybrid at and science work has used mimesis or naturalism as a primary agent. Artists and scientists have striven to develop more clearly defined images that serve a functional purpose, like a perfect three dimensional model of a working heart with all its details. If there is a single general expectation in these advances, it is that of its capacity to present an ever increasing realism. The quest for seamlessly reproduced worlds is paramount in the development of the simulation technologies. This ideal (achievable or otherwise) of immersive virtual reality consists of surrounding an individual with images, sounds and behaviours increasingly like those of the real world. The developing strategies are those of realism rid of expression, symbol or metaphor and they are sustained by the authorities of homogeneity and seamlessness. Just as long rendering times and their outcome of low frame rates are constantly, and expensively, fought against because they disturb the seamlessness and the effectiveness. of the illusion, so ruptures in the content and consumption of the worlds are discouraged. Stopping to consider the strangeness of a sound distorted by being played too slowly or the flickering or jerkiness of an image disrupts our sense of ourselves as being in normal relations with a world. Similarly the consideration of a subtext or a hidden meaning draws attention to our consideration and away from the construction and sustenance of our normal relationship to the world. One must see these contemporary desires as linked to a history of naturalism, its concurrent dualistic pairing of reality and appearance and the authority and correctness of institutional space. The stylistic parameters sustaining mimesis are always accompanied by distanciation. There is always a gap between medium and image, as can be clearly seen in the modes of realism found, for example, in painting and in film, even when they do not seek to challenge codes and conventions. The mimetic object has an affinity for the synchronic: the coming together formally, where everything is accounted for, controlled by boundaries, and broken out of the continuum and homogeneity of reality. It is readily evident in the notion of the frozen moment found in photography, with all its associations with permanence, possession, capture, finality and often termination – the stopping and framing of time and reality. With the development of rapidly changing and increasingly diffuse electronic space the frozen moment is subject to the fluctuations and indeterminacies of the diachronic. The image in these spaces is a virtual projection of the medium itself, not something gathering dust on the surface of its material. Here it is the difference not between the iconographic and indexical, but between two-dimensional thinking, with its fixed image surfaces, and n-dimensional images generated through bodies in motion image traces always in flux corresponding to a body’s passage through time and space.. Developments in cultural and social theory, and in technology have suggested that it is possible to move away from a graspable, predominately corporeal world to one which is increasingly slippery, elusive and immaterial. Mind and matter, combining in the cognitive body, are interdependent. The world we inhabit is in flux, comprised of increasingly complex connections and interactions. In this world there are no fixed objects, no unchanging contexts. There are only co-existant, nested multiplicities. Spectator and spectacle are entwined, occupying the same space. Perception enfolds us in matter and synthesizing us and the perceived object. In a world of objects, the subject is characterized and limited by boundaries and frames, perceived very much as invariant and separated from an unbroken field of transformations. Now it is possible to view ourselves as dynamic entities continually engaged in perpetual iconoclastic biological and social renovation and construction. Technologies of the self permit us to undertake transmutational operations on our own bodies and allows us to transform our image of ourselves existing in states of continuous construction