Camera Stylo 2020 Inside Print

04 Virtual Bodies: Cyborgs, Machinima, and a Phenomenology of Dissonance HARRISON WADE Donna Haraway calls her influential essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a myth “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (14). Haraway points out that if the cyborg is now popular, it is for the former qualities of its possibilities and not the political work needed to make those possibilities actual. Te cyborg often exists to entrench the dichotomies Haraway set out to dismantle between person and animal, mind and body, idealism and materialism. For Haraway, the cyborg is a figure of contemporary being. Te cyborg already exists within our global system of information and domination, 63 and her potential, particularly for women of colour, is to reclaim the already transgressed boundaries of our bodies. Tus, Haraway writes that a cyborg “is not innocent … it does not seek unitary identity and so generates antagonistic dualisms without end … Te machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (65). Te myth of “A Cyborg Manifesto” is a story about how the cyborg denaturalizes the antagonistic dualisms of our society and our stories. It is writing against writing. Te cyborg lets us escape myths of unitary subjectivity, because she is always incomplete and indeterminate. Her writing, “cyborg writing,” is “about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools” to remake the representations that have excluded the author (55). Tis writing is appropriation and change; it makes the mutability of systems of power visible and accessible, such that their representational power is laid bare. Cyborg writing, showing “how fundamental body imagery is to worldview, and so to political language,” changes reality by marking it as incomplete (53). To write away from a unifying subjectivity and towards an incomplete body challenges conventional acts of writing and beliefs in the power of writing. Machinima are a form of cyborg writing. As an aesthetic practice, they are inherently feminist along Haraway’s line of thought by treating representations of bodies as always incomplete, mutable, and transgressive. Moreover, their media specificity, as movies made in video game and computer graphics engines, not only highlights the indeterminacy of contemporary media but also of the self. Tey are myths against myths, stories that undo oppositional binaries, showing how the human is also the computer, and the mind is also the body. In this way, machinima alert us to the ways that our bodies are conditioned by contemporary media, alongside our cognitive processes and perception. Like the cyborg, machinima are never innocent. Tey present a double front of embodiment and conditioning—as objects that are both and neither cinema and video games. Te 64 machinima I will analyze here are feminist artworks explicitly working through representations of the female body made by contemporary female artists. Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) and Skawennati’s She Falls for Ages (2017) offer two distinct examples of what machinima can accomplish as feminist, cyborg texts. While the former highlights the instability of self and the latter presents a relatively unified narrative, I will argue that both machinima generate meaning through a formal and sensational aesthetics of dissonance. I will use phenomenology and affect theory to make sense of how I move with these movies. Both theories undo modernist hierarchies that privilege cognition over sensation and mind over body, taking up the political, feminist work Haraway outlines. Tis work means never arriving at something complete, never returning to a unifying theory of embodiment. Tis unstable embodiment pays attention to how I can be pulled in opposing directions at once and how media mediate how I interact with my body. It is not pure; there is no natural embodiment. Placing myself into a world always conditions my sensations, whether that world is a movie, video game, or machinima. Considering how I am conditioned resists my turning away from cognition. I will argue that these machinima achieve a political incompleteness in how they are never quite video games or movies, never totally critical or celebratory. In this incompleteness, these machinima demand that I split my subjectivity and modify my being, such that when I feel, I think, and when I think, I feel. Machinima largely escape the dichotomy of thinking and feeling by showing how virtual cognition can become embodied feeling. Tis can be seen in She Puppet, which develops dissonance between how a video game demands thought in navigating space and a movie that places the avatar in a realm of affective spectator experience. While the machinima I am interested in are part of an art world circuit (I first saw She Falls for Ages as an installation), most machinima are both artisanal and populist. Tis ambivalence is unavoidable. Produced with computer graphics engines, machinima depend on existing software, hardware, and 65 intellectual property. Tus, while there are plenty of machinima that, like She Puppet, critically interrogate the representational and computational limitations of their media, it would be remiss of me not to point to the fact that machinima are also, inevitably, advertisements. As a form of expression, machinima are a form of fan labour, existing alongside video essays and fan fiction. Popular machinima, like Red vs. Blue, a series based off the video game franchise Halo and distributed on YouTube, plays down its feminist dissonance by incorporating existing game mechanics into a narrative structure borrowed from the televised sitcom. Red vs. Blue achieved such a level of success that it was supported by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the developer of the Halo series at the time (Tompson 25). Tis support was both financial and environmental. Bungie, in fact, developed later games with in-game support for machinima animators. While this is a marginal, exemplary case of machinima becoming accepted and incorporated into game production, watching She Puppet and She Falls for Ages makes me want to play Tomb Raider and Second Life. I feel an itch in my fingers to play and create. Because most machinima exist in an artisanal circuit of forums and blogs and low-count YouTube videos, they inspire me to see what I could create. Unlike the polish of Red vs. Blue episodes, the dissonance of most machinima—between reality and the virtual, or what people might do and the limitations of the system—produces an affective response that points to the form’s feminist and democratic potential. We should remember that this is cyborg writing because it appropriates, steals, and makes production “equipment” accessible. Phenomenology lets us start working through the feeling of watching machinima, thus the awareness of being a cyborg. Phenomenology is, broadly, the study of phenomena. Specifically, it is the examination of our experience itself, and what perceptions go into our experience to generate meaning. As such, using phenomenology provides helpful vocabulary, particularly in expressing how I feel with the characters in She Puppet and She Falls for Ages, but lacks the language, as of yet, to speak to the itch in my fingers, the 66 sensation of my virtual flesh. Vivian Sobchack’s seminal essay, “What My Fingers Knew,” uses phenomenology to make sense of the body as site of reciprocal, carnal spectatorship that transgresses the dichotomies of subject and object, spectator and screen. Like Haraway, Sobchack attempts to allow for a sustained indeterminacy. She connects oppositional terms to figure the body as “both carnal and conscious, sensible and sentient” (83). If, at other points, she ends up privileging the former, this is perhaps a result of her work responding to earlier film theory that only privileged the latter. Tus, when she writes, “the cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the screen—able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a thought,” affect undoes the thinking subject (71). Sensation, as sight and touch, is privileged over thought. Despite this, Sobchack’s essay offers a transgressive and illuminating cyborg figure in her description of the body as a third term in the cinematic encounter. Usually cinema is theorized in two terms, the sensuousness of the screen, with its attending technologies, and the receptivity of the spectator, with her psychoanalytic unconscious and base perceptions. In suggesting the body as a third term, Sobchack does not mean to simply introduce a third, distinct concept, but means to disrupt the dichotomy of the other two. Te third term is a recognition that sensation moves in varying degrees between the two and is conditioned by the body. As Sobchack writes: “My lived body … subverts the very notion of onscreen and ofscreen as mutually exclusive sites or subject positions. Indeed, much of the ‘pleasure of the text’ emerges from this carnal subversion of fixed subject positions, from the body as a ‘third’ term that both exceeds and yet is within discrete representation.” (67) Tis body has apparent ties to machinima, although it demands we qualify Sobchack’s formulation. Not only do machinima involve the body as a third term, as a form of cinema, they also offer sensation tied to the experience of playing video games. 67 With machinima, I can never quite escape the difference between onscreen and offscreen as exclusive sites. Onscreen, I am experiencing the media object as a spectator, but offscreen my fingers have the urge to take hold of the avatar through a game controller. For Sobchack, cinema is subversive because the spectator identifies and feels with the characters, escaping their body. Tere is indeed a degree of subversion with machinima, as I identify and feel with Lara Croft in She Puppet or Otsitsakaion in She Falls for Ages as characters.

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