I’LL KEEP YOU WARM AND SAFE IN MY PEOPLE ZOO - Martina Menegon 2016 thanks to the internet WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT? - this is just an intro, not to get lost
In an interview with PBS in 2011, Dr. David Hanson asked his android modelled after sci-fi writer Philip K Dick1 if robots will take over the world. The robot replied saying: “Don’t worry, even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake”. The title quotes this answer, and exemplifies the fear of technology, of being controlled by it, as well as the comfort we may gain from it. I’LL KEEP YOU WARM AND SAFE IN MY PEOPLE ZOO deals with the perception of the human body in the digital age. It is a multimedia installation that creates a dialogue between the physical and the digital, a reflection on what is the body after it has been transferred into a virtual state. It is about digitalising the human body, transforming it into a 3D model, an avatar and bringing it back to the physical reality. It seeks this real-virtual connection through the two main characteristics of an avatar: the 3D shape and its UV texture map2.
1 Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982), american novelist, essayist, and philosopher. He authored many books, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that inspired the filmBlade Runner
2 UV mapping is the 3D modeling process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model’s surface. A UV map describes what part of a texture should be attached to each polygon in a model
3 FROM WHERE IT ALL STARTED: THE AVATAR - meanings and definitions
Avatar, or embodiment of something: somebody who embodies, personifies, or is the manifestation of an idea or concept3. The term avatar etymologically derives from the Sanskrit world avatāra, which refers to an incarnation, a bodily manifestation, of a deity, an immortal being. It means a “descent”, a “down-coming” of hindu gods and goddesses, the medium for accessing the physical and mortal world of humanity. In the context of computer technology, the term avatar has various competing definitions. It was coined in 1985 by Richard Garriot4 for the computer game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. In the game, Garriot wanted the player to be responsible for the character’s actions, to achieve this he felt the player had to play him/herself. The more common mean of avatar, indicating an online virtual body, was popularised by Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, in which the term describes virtual simulated humans and their reality, the Metaverse. In the broadest sense, an avatar is the “user’s representative in the virtual universe”5, “virtual constructs that are controlled by human players and function as a means of interacting with other characters”6, “a virtual, surrogate self that acts as a stand in for
3 As in Microsoft Encarta’s general dictionary
4 In other readings it is stated that the term avatar (as use in computing) was first used in 1985 by Chip Morningstar, a user of the first avatar environment created by LucasFilm called Habitat
5 Filiciak, M. Hyperidentities in The Video Game Theory Reader
6 Berger, A. A. Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon
4 our real-space selves, that present the user”7. It is a representation of a user8, that can be altered9. According to Wikipedia, an avatar is a graphical representations of the user, it can have three- or two-dimensional forms, and can also refer to a text construct. So in computing the sanskrit connotation of avatar is reversed: the original “descent” to the corporeal (embodiment) becomes an “ascent” to the immaterial virtual space (disembodiment). All those definitions describe theavatar as a virtualisation of the body, and implicate that the user, by engaging with an avatar, becomes something different, something better. The definition of avatar proposed by Second Life, the popular online virtual world developed by Linden Lab in 200310 that an avatar is the digital persona you create and customise, is the 3D version of yourself or of anyone you want to be, exemplifies the optimistic view of virtual worlds as utopian places. Although this is the most common and popular definition of avatar, it is also a quite superficial one, as it does not take in account the recent hyper-usage of online environments. Digital media researcher Beth Coleman states that today’s lives are increasingly framed by real-time, visual and simulated media and that a sense of connectivity is deeply incorporated into our lives. This causes what she calls “x-reality”, a continuum between online and offline11, a constant exchange between virtual and real, in which virtual reality becomes an augmentation of our actual
7 Laetitia Wilson definition as in Waggoner, Z. My Avatar, My Self
8 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing)
9 Thomas Goldberg distinguishes between “avatars” and “agents”. He defines a virtual avatar as any “representations of real people in computer-generated environments” and agents as “any semiautonomous piece of software that assume some visual embodiment”. As in Andrews, P. Avatar and Self: a rhetoric of identity mediated through collaborative role-play
10 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
11 Coleman, B. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation
5 world. Coleman broadens the concept of avatar to all “images, text and multimedia that make up our identities as networked subject”. The avatar is not a virtualisation but an actualisation of the self12, it is made of all real time digital extensions of the subject, it moves from a graphical representation, to an extension, a prothesis of the self, an alter-ego13, a “second self”, something so close to oneself to appear almost a part of it14. Body extensions are closely connected to the figure of the cyborg15, a hybrid of flesh and machine. Today’s everyday interaction with, and dependance on, networked media16 proposes a new form of cyborg, a metaphoric one, made of a complex assemblage of the physical and the virtual. In fact, like the cyborg, the figure of the avatar is both real and fictional17, it is a virtual prothesis that occupies online cyberspaces. In Understand Media, Mcluhan sees new media forms as technological extension of man18. Rather than a replace for lost
12 Coleman, B. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation
13 Latin for “the other I”
14 Coleman states: “Media usage changes the user. With each shift in automation, simulation and transmission, we discover not only new technologies but also new facets of ourselves”
15 Short for cybernetic organism. The term was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the 60s, when they wrote an article about the need for self-regulating cybernetic human- machine systems to enable human space exploration
16 Coleman use the term networked media to describes technologies connected to a distributed transmission network, i.e the internet
17 As Donna Haraway explains in her Cyborg Manifesto: “we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality”
18 All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical. The book is an extension of the eye.. clothing, an extension of the skin” in Mcluhan, M. Understanding Media
6 functions, those prothesis enhance, extend, amplify human faculties, “affecting the nature and scale of human consciousness and subjectivity”19. Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blascovich define an avatar as “a perceivable”20 digital representation in virtual environments. Perceivable, meaning that an avatar is something we can perceive, feel, sense.
19 Cleland, K. Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs
20 Bailenson, J. and Blascovich, J. Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Down of the Virtual Revolution
7 Robbie Cooper Alter Ego: Avatars and their creators 2007
8 LaTurbo Avedon Self-Portrait 2015
9 DREAMS OF FRAGMENTATION - incorporating the virtual: the mirror image and the uncanny
Avatars became an assemblage of physical and virtual self, a symbiotic amalgamation of human and computer. Scott Bukatman calls this new subjectivity and identity created through the human-computer hybridisation terminal identity, “an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity”21. Olaf Blanke, neurologist of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, says it just takes a few minutes in a virtual environment to override the perception of what our body is and where it is22. Behaviours can change for hours, days or even months. During his researches, Blanke discovered that the temporo-parietal cortex23 lights up at the moment we identify with a virtual avatar, just like when we watch ourselves in a mirror. He also noticed that, like a sort of phantom limb pain, a physical response can be created through virtual simulation24. In The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television and New Media Like Real People and Places, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass argue that our “old brains” can’t yet distinguish between the real physical world and the virtual one. Even when
21 Bukatman, S. Terminal Identity
22 Blanke, O. First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
23 The part of our brain that integrates touch and vision into a coherent perception
24 Sarah C.P. Williams in her article Me, Meet Virtual Me describes Blanke’s experiment, saying after a while you engage so much with the virtual avatar you start to be it, and if a hand pokes this other-you, “you’ll swear you feel it on your arm”
10 consciously aware of the virtual nature of an image, we have the tendency of integrate it and treat it as real, physical. Rather than the actual body disappearing (“left behind” and “amputated”25) in the cyberspace, the contemporary self-body incorporates the virtual, transforms it into another kind of body, that exists simultaneously in both worlds. Yacov Sharir26 describes his experience as “being in another, additional skin”, he feels a “sense of heightened anxiety” caused by the doubling of his own body. For Sharir, the “sensation of disembodiment cannot be disconnected from a sensation of embodiment”, as he could “feel the groundedness of gravity simultaneously with the sense of altered abilities”27. When the real body strongly identifies with its simulation, a profound split of subjectivity and identity happens, an “unnerving vertigo”28 that creates a sort of what Lacan described as “mirror image”, a continuous oscillation between experiencing the self as self and the self as other. For Lacan, the mirror image happens during the first encounter with our specular image, it is the origin of the ideal ego. Lacan’s mirror image is not a mere reflection of the self, it is a foreign entity, a contradictory image compared to the sense of fragmentation of the self. It simultaneously produces a sense of alienation and identification. For Lacan the unity of the ego is constantly threatened by the memory of its fragmentation. This process is radicalised when we experience a much more complex
25 John Perry Barlow, in describing his experience of cyberspace, says “Nothing could be more disembodied or insensate than the experience of cyberspace. It’s like having your everything amputated”
26 Yacov Sharir is a choreographer, dancer, technologist and innovator. He is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas-Austin, and Artistic Director of the Austin-based Sharir Dance Company
27 Sharir, Y. Virtually Dancing
28 Coleman, B. Hello Avatar
11 mis-recognition of self, an intricate distribution of identity and subjectivity between our physical and digital selves. Katherine Hayles calls this the “mirror of the Cyborg”29, as our physical body boundaries are opened up and reconfigured by the virtual body. The actual physical body is simultaneously de- and rematerialised in a virtual body, the avatar “both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen”30. So the avatar is part of the user but also separate from it, it exist independently. Kathy Cleland introduces the idea of the avatar as the uncanny other31. The Freudian notion of the uncanny is pivotal for investigating feelings of ambivalence and unease provoked by avatars. For Freud, the sense of the uncanny is triggered by different phenomena: life-like dolls and automata, mirror images, doppelgänger, magic and animism, spirits and ghosts as well as detached body parts. All those create a sense of “intellectual uncertainty”32, in which boundaries between self and other, animate and inanimate, real and unreal, human and non-human, are unclear, confusing33. For Cleland, today’s body is “experienced by the subject in dreams of disintegration and disjointed limbs”34, it is what Lacan described as “fragmented”, in bits and pieces. The contemporary self is multiple, dynamic and unstable, fluid, unlimited and in constant change.
29 Hayles, K. The Seductions of Cyberspace
30 Hayles, K. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
31 Cleland, K. Image Avatars: Self-Other encounters in a mediated world
32 Ernst Jentsch in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny, defines the uncanny as a product of “intellectual uncertainty”
33 Freud, S. The Uncanny
34 Lacan’s description of the “fragmented body” as in Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
12 Kurt Hentschlager Cluster 2009-2012
13 Erica Lapadat-Janzen Flannery Mitchell 2015
14 Rolling Leonard Self Portrait 2012
15 MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER - being everywhere at anytime
The notion of the self as a multiple is not new. We all perform different identities depending on the contexts and people we are interacting with. As Stuart Hall summarises, “we can no longer conceive the individual in terms of a whole, stable and completed Ego or autonomous, rational self. The self is conceptualised as more fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple selves or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit”35. Nevertheless, online environments allows these multiple identities to exist simultaneously and they can be switched quicker than in the offline world. Sherry Turkle uses the metaphor of “windows” to describe the shuttle between different identities: “in the daily practice of many computer users, windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system. The self is no longer playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time”36. Today we can transit seamlessly between our different digital selves. Bolter and Grusin argue that our identity is constituted by those oscillations37. Turkle compares it to the experience of multiple personality disorder, a schizophrenic projection and fragmentation of subjectivity. The self, instead of being a unified
35 Hall, S. The Meaning of New Times
36 Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
37 Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. Remediation
16 and whole, is fundamentally decentered, “there is no core self”38, “fragmentation is the truth of existence”39. This fragmentation of the self is amplified in the relation between the human and the avatar, as the discontinuous fractal self is alimented in the virtual world through the use of the latter. With near infinite possibilities of representation in virtual spaces, we rely on technology to find, to become, ourselves. Identity becomes polyphonic, computers become “intimate machines”40, online personas are part of our multiple selves. The body is no longer separated or differentiated from the machine, computers have become “significant others“41.
38 Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
39 Dean, C. quote as in Knox, J. The Avatar in the Mirror: A Lacanian analysis of the virtual world self
40 Turkle, S. The Second Self
41 Lupton D. The Embodied Computer/User
17 Rafia Santana Very Little Sleep 2015
18 Claudia Maté Stop Aging Now! 2015
19 BODY, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? - physical virtuality, virtual corporeality
Since the 90s a discourse about the regeneration and amplification of the body by new technologies has been predominant. The physical body as we know it has been declared dead, replaced by a new cyber body. The body made of flash-and-bones is considered inadequate to survive the new computerised world. The contemporary body slips from its organic fixity to its multiplicity in today’s technological age. Technology creates new processes of identity redefinition. The body is in constant de- and re-construction, it is an organic and inorganic hybrid oscillating between materiality and virtuality. The body is dislocated from its corporeality, the flesh is dematerialised through manipulations and alterations of the self42. Those alterations destabilise its identity, redraw its subjectivity. Donna Haraway’s question “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”43 is nowadays more and more relevant, as issues regarding body, its boundaries and subjectivity are questioning the very understanding of what is considered to be human. There is an obsession with the redefinition of self, the body is programmed, cloned, replicated, manipulated, de-naturalised. It has a new flesh and artificial materiality. Subjectivity is dispersed throughout cyberspace, as meanwhile users boundaries are not defined by the skin but rather by the connection of the physical body with its simulation. Post-humanists state that there are no essential differences between the physical and the simulated self. Differing from the notion of the cyborg,
42 Macrí, T. Il Corpo Postorganico
43 Haraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto
20 post-humans44 don’t need body alteration. It is about being so intensively connected with machines and our multifaceted selves that is no longer possible to distinguish between biological and informational self. Although considering our current status as post-human could sound a bit dramatic, it certainly underlines the new experiences of corporeality and subjectivity that we are facing today, and how seamless physical and virtual reality have become. The body has become a communication interface between the real and the virtual world. A disappearing of the body and the flesh results from this assemblage, this fusion of actual reality with virtual one(s). This post-human state, as exciting and interesting as it is, creates anxiety about body boundaries, consciousness, subjectivity and identity: ”What if humans were made to function as if they were components of another entity? What if people were made to behave as if they were computers?”45. Users are craving unification and identification with their digital selves, haunted by the thought explained by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker: “If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this not be because the body no longer exists?”46. But bodies can never be made solely of information, no matter which side of the computer screen they are on. So how to react against this loss of physicality? The ultimate solution seems a return to the “real body”, the body made of flesh. New media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen sees the human body as important, pivotal element in today’s cyberculture discourses, as it is still the key and primary interface for all
44 A person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. The post- human is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive the human
45 as in Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman
46 Kroker, A. and Kroker, M. Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper- Modern Condition
21 experiences, real or virtual47. As Katherine Hayles comments: “Cyberspace, we are often told, is a disembodied medium. In a sense, this is correct; the body remains in front of the screen rather than within it. In another sense, however, this is deeply misleading, for it obscures the crucial role that the body plays in constructing cyberspace. In fact, we are never disembodied. Far from being left behind when we enter cyberspace, our bodies are no less actively involved in the construction of virtuality than in the construction of real life”48. Doubtless, there has been a change in the notion of the body during the last decades, but where a good amount of studies see the end of the physical body and a loss of the flesh, there too surfaces a new challenging attitude and a feeling towards the actual body, that implies an effort to understand how we relate to our virtual selves, and how they relate to us. Through the virtual prosthesis of the avatar, we can explore cyberspaces and transfer these experiences back to the realm of the offline self.
47 Hansen, M.B.N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
48 Hayles, K. Embodied Virtuality: or how to put Bodies back into the Picture
22 Jeremy Bailey Important Portrait of the Artist’s Wife 2013
23 A VIRTUAL PUNCH REALLY HURTS - autoscopic hallucination and mirrored neuron system
Autoscopic hallucination is a particular kind of out of body experience, in which the individual looks at an externalised doppelgänger image of himself while remaining inside of his body. It is what Cleland defines as dual embodiment49. This hallucination has been observed in patients suffering from epilepsy and migraines, schizophrenia, depression and dissociative disorders and has been of interest for both neurologist and psychiatrist. Neurologist Olaf Blanke and his team observed that this phenomenon can be re-created in virtual spaces, as the user simultaneously experiences his physical and virtual body50. Specially in video games and virtual worlds this split of subjectivity is reinforced by the ability to switch views between first and third person, where in the last case feelings of embodiment and disembodiment happen at the same time. Answering Cleland’s question if there is the possibility for the physical body to experience the virtual one51, Blanke’s team has shown that bodily self-consciousness can be extended into prostheses and virtual bodies. In their contemporary version of the rubber hand illusion experiment52, a robot hand is placed behind the user, touching his back in a delayed imitation of the user’s movements. This is causing the brain to feel the robot’s touch as foreign. Blanke
49 Cleland, K. Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs
50 Blanke, O. First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
51 Cleland, K. Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs
52 Subjects where positioned with a lifelike rubber hand in front of them, their real left one hidden. If the real hidden hand and the fake one were stroked synchronously, the subjects would experience the rubber one as their own
24 explains that “very often in those cases of double touch, the response is that you feel ticklish or tickled by somebody else”53. In another experiment, Blanke observed that users can be tricked into experiencing the avatar’s body as their own54. This phenomenon is called proprioceptive drift. It happens when a multi-sensory conflict occurs and vision is more likely to take over proprioception and touch. Even without a tactile and kinaesthetic sensory feedback, sensations experienced outside the body can be felt by the physical body. The mirror neuron system, that causes the remapping of senses, responds also when we watch someone else perform an action, investigating what happens when this other is a virtual body image of the self. Cleland argues that “what happens to our virtual bodies triggers empathetic kinaesthetic experiences and feelings in our physical bodies as affect and sensation are distributed throughout the mixed reality complex of our physical and virtual selves”55. The experience of the physical body is increasingly mediated and augmented by technologies.
53 Some subjects did not finish the experiments, as not only they felt like someone else was touching them, but also that somebody else was presence. As in Stock, M. Scientists create ‘ghosts’ in the lab by tricking the brain
54 Subjects experienced a Full Body Illusion when their body was stroke simultaneously with their avatar one. Also, this is the first study that demonstrate a link between Full Body Illusion and a change in body temperature. As in Blanke, O. Full body illusion is associated with widespread skin temperature reduction
55 Cleland, K. Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs
25 Golan Levin Augmented Hand Series 2014
26 Jeffrey Shaw Fall Again. Fall Better 2012
27 I’LL MAKE IT WEIRD AND GIVE YOU SHIVERS - rediscover physicality through digital bodies
“A cloud of bodies, intertwined, relating to one another in a manner entirely foreign. Were they meant to float in air - were they meant to dissolve into a mesh? Between mirrors and rainbows, partial interactions and mute expressions, we start to recover a map. This is what people look like now”56. The corporeal body, in digital culture, has been contrasted with a technological and virtual one through the notions of the cyborg and the post-human. While the cyborg figure was thought as a liberation from the constrains of the human body57, the post-human being is a dystopian hybrid, referencing automation. Today we can create as many digital selves as we like and our avatars can be programmed to act autonomously in our absence. The question remains if these virtual bodies are prosthetic extensions of ourselves or uncanny, alien others. Jean Baudrillard, in his essay Clone Story, writes: “The double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again”58. Virtual bodies propose a synthetic corporeality, evoking a sense of uncanniness due to the blurring of the split between real and virtual, flesh and data. This boundaries confusion is central to Masahiro Mori’s notion of the Uncanny Valley, where he finds
56 Zepka, E. Still Exits and Common Skins for The New Flesh exhibition
57 Haraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto
58 Baudrillard, J. Clone Story
28 uncanniness in characters that look “almost human”59. For Mori, when these entities become too human-like, it is the non-human aspects that stand out, i.e. incorrect facial expressions, lifeless eyes, disjointed movements. This disquiet feeling is being explored and exaggerated in digital art, in which, through the use of stock animations60 and anatomically accurate generic humanoid shapes, the human body is imported in virtual spaces where it become simultaneously realistic and completely artificial, natural yet eerily unnatural. It often experiences deformations and technological failures. It is a virtual body that fails in trying to be realistic, it is grotesque and uncanny, vaguely or remarkably wrong. But it is exactly through these deformations and exaggerations that physicality is brought back into discussion. By displaying human bodies as twisted, deformed and sometimes monstrous, a sort of autoscopic hallucination happens, creating a strong awareness of the body as flesh. Ksenia Fedorova says “the awareness of the self (grounded in the felt relationality of our body parts) is most significantly activated at the moments of disturbance of balance, in situations of perplexity and disorientation”61. Slavoj Žižek, in Fright of Real Tears writes that “in order to produce the effect of self-enclosure, one must add to the series an excessive element which ‘structures’ it precisely insofar as it does not belong to the series, but sticks out as an exception”62. While looking at the over-exaggerated facial expressions of the avatars in Mike Pelletier’s work, the perception of our face is augmented. Pelletier creates generic genderless characters using the open source software MakeHuman in which it is
59 Mori, M. The Uncanny Valley
60 This is one method of animating a digital body. Realistic motions can also be captured with a motion-tracking system for example
61 Fedorova, K. Mechanisms of Augmentation in Proprioceptive Media Art
62 Žižek, S. Fright of real Tears
29 possible to create realistic human bodies by sliding through standard parameter, i.e. height, weight, muscles, gender or age. He challenges these virtual bodies by tweaking certain values or properties and shows the mistakes and failures of the digital transposition of the physical reality. In the case of Parametric Expression, parameters of facial movements are over-exaggerated, provoking a distortion of the digital model, that slowly turns into a variety of abstract geometrical shapes. This work creates a profound understanding of our facial movements while expressing our emotions. It conveys technically and visually what it means to smile, to be sad or angry. In Performance Capture: Part 2 and Coordinated Movement, limbs start twitching and deforming strangely, thereby stimulating our actual body to react, almost like it would feel the pain those movements might cause if they would happen in reality. Ben Carney’s work Nonmanifold_mandible investigates the loss of control over human emotions. His digital character’s facial expressions become violent and uncontrollable. In Jesse Kanda’s work, especially in his music videos for ARCA63, skin, flesh and body mass become clear, heavy and present. Kanda embraces digital failure and creates distorted, dancing, uncanny bodies. In Thievery, Xen64, an androgynous figure, dances in a weird sensual way, facing a wall, while light flashes. The twisting body, transported into the virtual environment through a motion capture process, shows its failure to be fully real, while its skin ripples as it dances and it hurts. It hurts even more when the body in Fluid Silhouettes melts, moving and fighting its fluid states. The head grows, the arms extend without limits, the skin turns into an empty plastic cloth. As the body is scrutinised and technological potential is challenged, more and more artists work with the artifacts of the failures of
63 who is ARCA
64 Xen is ARCA’s gender-ambiguous alter ego
30 digital reproduction and capturing. While some artists base their work on tweaking parameters and the exaggeration of movements or physical aspects of virtual bodies, others are interested in the translation of the body in and by technological data. Sophie Kahn’s Synthetic Sculptures for example are failed 3D life-sized printed sculptures of her body. Her main interest is the eeriness of digital duplication, she explores the ways technology misunderstands and fails to capture the actual reality. The polish duo Ewelina Aleksandrowicz and Andrzej Wojtas, aka Pussykrew create disturbingly wrong sculptures, out of virtual meshes or shiny plastic, in which faces double and melt. Digital art proprioceptively renegotiates the gap between actual and informatic bodies. It is about “inevitability, failure and the grotesque”, a “response of fleshly proportions to a world of technical and mythical saturation”65.
65 Zepka, E. Still Exits and Common Skins for The New Flesh exhibition
31 Mike Pelletier Performance Capture: Part 2 (Still Frames) 2015
32 Jesse Kanda Thievery (Still Frames) 2014
33 Jesse Kanda Fluid Silhouettes (Still Frames) 2014
34 Klaus Obermaier D.a.v.e. 1999
35 Mitch Posada Databending Portraits 2014
36 Ben Carney Nonmanifold_Mandible (Still Frames) 2009
37 Ivana Basic Das Unheimliche (Details) 2013
38 Gergő Kovács Realistic Rigging 2015
39 Thom Rugo omw to steal ur data 2015
40 Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault selfportrait.map (Detail) 2000
41 Pussycrew Materia 2014
42 Sophie Kahn Laura:RGB 2011
43 I’LL KEEP YOU WARM AND SAFE IN MY PEOPLE ZOO - techno-schizofrenia
A wall-size projection shows a mass of naked digital clones piled-up and fighting against gravity and physics. As their heads point towards the visitors present in the room, they create a dialogue with them. A rigged66 3D model of myself has been transformed into a ragdoll67 in Unity 3D, a game engine software. The model copies itself into an empty virtual space at random intervals, thereby filling up the space with clones. Because of theragdoll physics, the clones react to gravity, fall to the ground and collide with each other. This creates unstable and unpredictable reactions like twitched, convulsive movements and craning necks, giving these bodies an uncanny, grotesque, disquiet and disturbing aura. A second video shows my attempts to wear a printed UV map. My actual body is treated as a mesh, a model, a surface that changes according to which part of the printed body is overlapping the real one. In a first step my actual body was translated into a textured 3D shape, a rigged unaltered simulation of myself. Initially the
66 A character rig is essentially a digital skeleton bound to the 3D mesh
67 In computer physics engines, ragdoll physics is a type of procedural animation, often used as a replacement for static death animations in video games. It refers to the ability of a virtual character to react according gravity, and collide with other physical objects. According to urbandictionary.com, ragdoll is “a term used in modern electronic games, where characters fall limply and body parts interact with the environment after being killed. The goal of Ragdoll physics is creating more realistic corpses. This often results in cringes of horror, or bursts of laughter based on the corpses flipping or slumping”
44 Artec Eva, a handheld 3D scanner, “the ideal choice for making a quick, textured and accurate 3D model”, was used. The scanning process required me to stand naked, in a half T-pose68, without moving or breathing too fast, for the duration of the scanning (approx. 8 min). The experience was a weird one as it required me to stand in an unnatural pose, contracting all my muscles in order not to move too much while lights flashed and beeping warning sounds surrounded me. After many attempts, the software still failed to recognize many body parts, i.e. the back of my head, a foot or some fingers. In the end just a change of technology facilitated the desired results. Using Photogrammetry 3D Scanning69 reduced the scanning time to few seconds and eased the effort of standing still without moving. Michael J. Black70 said that “a scan is just a scan, a collection of points frozen at an instance in time”71 and needs to be posed and animated in order to come alive. My digital model was rigged to a simple skeleton in a 3D software and imported into Unity 3D to be animated and ragdollify. The UV map was printed onto a semi-transparent soft fabric in its original size and my attempts to wear it were recorded. Common to both installations is the use of digital media to re-materialise the body, while questioning the gap between real and virtual, flesh and data. The body is the core, the platform of expression in both works. It is a fluid body, constantly switching between realities, physical and digital states. Both works share
68 A T-pose, or bind pose, is the default unanimated state of a 3D model, where all its parts are straightened out or flattened for ease of animation. In case of humanoid characters this often results in a pose where the legs are straight and the arms are pointing sideways in a T shape
69 3D scanning technique in which lots of cameras simultaneously take pictures of the object / subject and a software align them in order to create a textured 3D model
70 Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
71 Scans to Avatar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln3Ju7vOaHY
45 the same technical core, the digital scan of my real body as the software processed it, minus artifacts. As CGI shapes our view of the physical world, virtual representation of reality shifts from the mirror to the projection. The body, shared through different realities, transforms through the confrontation with the image of oneself and stimulates a construction of new physical states and levels of conscious awareness. This confrontation and dialogue between physical and virtual body can not result in an equivalence or unity of the two, but can establish a relationship between them. In a contemporary version of what Lacan calls “paranoiac knowledge”72, we need to relate to the virtual image of ourself in order to establish a relationship with the self, physically and digitally. Working through the grotesque, the deformed and the uncanny, offers us the possibility of doing that. This recalls Fedorova’s statement that the awareness of the self can be activated trough disorienting, distrubing situations. As Stelarc says: “The monstrous is no longer the alien other”73. It is me, opened and spread with no apparent logic on a flat 2D image, or me bouncing helplessly in virtual space, surrounded by an undefined number of other mes, fighting through a similar situation of techno-schizofrenia. It is my physical body trying to relate and re-connect with its digital simulation.
72 For Lacan, all knowledge is imbued with paranoia, as in the processes of knowing a person confront the real as well as the unknown. As Dylan Evans explains: “Imaginary knowledge is called ‘paranoiac knowledge’ by Lacan because it has the same structure as paranoia (both involve a delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery), and because one of the preconditions of all human knowledge is the ‘paranoiac alienation of the ego’”
73 Stelarc The Cadaver, The Comatose, and The Chimeras: Avatars Have No Organs
46 3D body scan full body - detail 2016
47 3D body scan face - detail 2016
48 Martina Menegon I’LL KEEP YOU WARM AND SAFE IN MY PEOPLE ZOO 2016
49 3D body scan UV map - detail 2016
50 Martina Menegon I’LL KEEP YOU WARM AND SAFE IN MY PEOPLE ZOO 2016
51 REFERENCES - a selection of books, articles and websites
Andrews, P. Avatar and Self: a rhetoric of identity mediated through collaborative role-play (2013)
Bailenson, J. and Blascovich, J. Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Down of the Virtual Revolution (2011)
Baudrillard, J. Clone Story in Simulacra and Simulation (1994)
Berger, A. A. Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon (2002)
Blanke, O. First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality (2010)
Blanke, O. Full body illusion is associated with widespread skin temperature reduction (2013)
Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. Remediation: Understanding New Media (1998)
Bukatman, S. Terminal Identity (1993)
Carbonell, C. A Contest of Tropes: Screened Posthuman Subjectivities (2015)
Cleland, K. Image Avatars: Self-Other encounters in a mediated world (2008)
Cleland, K. Prosthetic Bodies and Virtual Cyborgs (2009)
Coleman, B. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (2011)
Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996)
Fedorova, K. Augmented Reality Art and Proprioception: Towards a Theoretical Framework (2015)
Fedorova, K. Mechanisms of Augmentation in Proprioceptive Media Art (2013)
Filiciak, M. Hyperidentities in The Video Game Theory Reader (2003)
Freud, S. The Uncanny (1919)
Glavanakova, A. Posthuman Transformations (2014)
52 Hansen, M. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006)
Haraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)
Hayles, K. Embodied Virtuality: or how to put Bodies back into the Picture (1996)
Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman (1999)
Hayles, K. The Seductions of Cyberspace (1993)
Hayles, K. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers(1999)
Jentsch, E. On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906)
Knox, J. The Avatar in the Mirror (2009)
Kosut, M. Virtual Body Modification : Embodiment, Identity, and Nonconforming Avatars (2011)
Krämer, S. Does the body disappear? (2008)
Kroker, A. and Kroker, M. Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper- Modern Condition (1987)
Kurt, M. Corporeal Experience in Virtual Reality (2011)
Lupton D. The Embodied Computer/User (1995)
Macrí, T. Il Corpo Postorganico (2006)
Mcluhan, M. Understanding Media (1964)
Mori, M. The Uncanny Valley (1970)
Munster, A. Materializing New Media (2006)
Negru, T. Rethinking the Human Body in the Digital Age (2012)
Nemura, N. A Study of Change of the Body View in Cyberculture (2014)
Stelarc The Cadaver, The Comatose, and The Chimeras: Avatars Have No Organs (2009)
Stock, M. Scientists create ‘ghosts’ in the lab by tricking the brain (2015)
53 Turkle, S. Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality (1994)
Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)
Turkle, S. The Second SelfI (1984)
Valvoda, J. Virtual Humanoids and Presence in Virtual Environments (2007)
Waggoner, Z. My Avatar, My Self (2009)
Williams, S. Me, Meet Virtual Me (2015)
Wood, J. The Virtual Embodied: Presence/practice/technology (1998)
Zepka, E. Still Exits and Common Skins (2015)
Žižek, S. Fright of real Tears (2001)
54 thanks to: Brigitte Kowanz and the Transmediale Kunst team Stefano D’Alessio for the sound and programming help 3SNC.net for the body scan