Abstract

Materializing New Media is concerned with producing a radically different conceptual and aesthetic genealogy for digital aesthetics that acknowledges new media's relation to materiality. It proposes materializing new media culture by demonstrating that its aesthetics have frequently engaged with the visualization of bodies and that they have incorporated new aspects of bodily engagement into the technologies themselves. These range from the development of haptic and gestural interfaces to acknowledging the impact that corporeal movement, material and environmental circumstances have on producing new media art and culture. Information aesthetics, I argue, have emerged in the reconfiguration of relations between body, materiality (including technical, lived and physical parameters) and the computer. At the levels of image and interface, artists, designers and architects using new media have consistently considered the impact of bodies and material life on these technologies. They have also sought ways to sustain new engagements between computational media and embodiment. The aesthetics of information culture is concerned with modes of sensory engagement in which distributed spaces and temporal variation play crucial roles. Hence, in engaging with and visualizing bodies and in responding to material parameters, new media simultaneously changes our understanding of and relationships with our own bodies. This book demonstrates that experiments with bodily image and embodied interfaces in new media art have contributed to a new sense of human being as an embodied life form.

Excerpt (pp. 120–121)

Artists have frequently responded to the socalled dematerializing tendencies of information culture by bringing bodies into direct contact with computational hardware in their work. In Diane Ludin's performance and database installation Memory Flesh 2.0 (2004) a performer sits calmly suturing her leg while images, originally obtained from the internet and now stored in a database, are generated into collages on an adjacent monitor. The stream of image collages is comprised of journalistic and scientific text statements and visual content engendered and published on the web on completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP). We are confronted with the public discourse and face of the HGP - a scientific project that transforms the body into sequences of dematerialized information - in immediate proximity and jarring contact with the intimate and overtly painful gestures of skin penetration and body modification.

As it turns out, the suturing is only a performance; the woman stitching away at herself is piercing nothing more than a pair of nylons. A bend sensor is attached to the needle so that while the suturing is taking place the signal generated by the performer's gestures can be crossprocessed and used to generate the database image collages. The point in Memory Flesh 2.0 is not so much that the suturing is fake but that it is a performance; it gestures towards something in a metaphorical manner. For Ludin, the metaphor of penetrating the body's surface with a technological device helps us think about the ways in which information - especially information from something as regulatory and managerial as the HGP - literally gets under our skin. Equally, the visceral body, that body sitting just below the epidermis, becomes the source from which dematerialized versions of an informatically organized body are first generated. An interesting correlation between Rokeby and Ludin's understanding of body-computer interaction arises in the interstices between 1980s highend dedicated hardware interfaces and the new media interfaces of the new millennium. In Very Nervous System Rokeby drew our attention to the extent to which computational interface design derived from a tradition in which the body had been removed. In Memory Flesh 2.0 (2004), Ludin makes this very same observation and uses this as a starting point for the juxtaposition between a startling body-based performance and the continuing shuttered sensibility of information technologies: "The internet and information as well as computer technology are all about restriction. Because this is the case, representations of the body have to be extreme and exaggerated to begin to reflect something of power, something of experience/life that we are used to outside the computer." (Diane Ludin, e-mail correspondence with the author, 2005).

Body-computer interaction in both these cases is not accomplished through the seamless transmission of information from one dislocated space to another. Surfaces and volumes, contours and folds may be hooked into each other through information circuits but frictional and resistant interfaces emerge from these interactions.

Copyright 2006 Anna Munster, used with permission of Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England. www.upne.com

Anna Munster
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College/University of New England Press, 2006.