Here is an essay that I wrote for a Conceptual Practices class. It could use a lot of refining but I think there are a few interesting ideas here about the body’s relationship to art. I’d be curious to hear what you think of these human/technological hybridities as mechanisms for art-making.
Ray Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity refers to the point in time when machines surpass human consciousness and improve their own design beyond the point of human conception.1 It may seem like a paranoid theory developed in the wake of rapid technological advancements; a way to explain, if not justify, the ways in which processes of human life are continually being mechanized. But that is too simple. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the capacity of the human body, where it fails, and how it can be designed in a better, more efficient way. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the language we give to functioning and disfuctioning bodies; how language is not attributed to “normal” bodies but is vast in reference to ailing ones. Disfunctioning bodies are blind, disfigured, amputated, and so on. What happens when the emphasis is inverted, when disabilities become opportunities for extra-abilities? If Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s was about extending the scope of art and life, Conceptual art of the future will be about extending the scope of what it is to be human. Performance art has already achieved a certain degree of this, through challenging the limits of the body and using it as the site where art emerges. The era approaching the Singularity, however, will allow for the body to be used as a tool for art making; for using the body as the very mechanism that enables the production of art. Aimee Mullins and Rob Spence represent the re-articulation of disability as an opportunity for creative production that is made possible by a consilience between technological and artistic ingenuity. This paper will outline how their loss of conventional human ability becomes the hinge point for an ability that is unhindered by existing bodily design.
Aimee Mullins uses her disability as an occasion to redefine the usual notions of the aesthetics of the body. Although she had both legs amputated below the knee as an infant, instead of considering the compilation of her body as a condition, or a state of deficiency, Mullins has used art and imagination to develop enhancements to the natural body, most notably as three characters in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle 3. In his Cremaster Cycle series, Barney creates vivid, elaborate and bizarre scenes and narratives that explore the hybridity of the body. David Hopkins argues that perhaps Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is “a crisis of masculinity, tied up with the social shifts arising from women’s empowerment, as endemic to the 1990s. It seems more likely, however, that it dramatizes the desire to transcend human givens, to achieve bio-mechanical syntheses.”2 I tend to agree with the latter, and the inclusion of Mullins in the third iteration of the Cremaster Cycle corroborates the desire for—and possibility of—physical enhancement and, perhaps, transcendence.
Mullins’s embodiment of three characters in the Cremaster Cycle 3 is evidence of the physical extension of the body that can occur through “disability.” Without human legs, Mullins’s limbs can take any form that the artist imagines, and in the case of Barney, they take the form of articulated cheetah hinds, a potato and beet garden, and glass. With the exception of the potato and beet garden legs, none of these creative visualizations would be possible with human legs and without digital manipulation. Mullins’s cheetah hinds positively defy the appearance of human legs, with an extra knee that appears backwards, paws that have a far smaller footprint than a human foot, and even a whipping tail. No human legs could be fashioned to look this way. This realm of possibility is especially apparent with the glass legs, which are in fact “optically clear polyurethane,”3 the stuff of bowling balls. Although the legs take human form, their material reveals that no human tibia or fibula is present. They are completely transparent, revealing what is set behind the legs, tracing the movement of the characters around her, even reflecting her own white dress. Mullins recognizes her involvement in the Cremaster Cycle 3 as being the point at which she realized that her “legs could become wearable sculpture,” and when she “started to move away from the need to replicate humanness as the only aesthetic ideal.”4 For Mullins, “poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object into the realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.”5 Although the sculptural legs imagined and produced by Barney and Mullins do not take the dematerialized form that is characteristic of Conceptual art (and are obviously manifested as objects), the aim—of widening the scope of understanding and meaning—implies a similar impulse for production. For Mullins, using the possibility of her body is a political act; an act of asserting an identity (and ability) that defies the one assigned to her by popular opinion. The interstices of form, function and aesthetics provide a basis of production for Mullins—neither element should be valued independently but instead work together, overlap, and allow even more realms of possibility to be enacted upon the body.
Toronto-based filmmaker Rob Spence takes a similar approach to disability as Mullins, using it not as a point of deficiency but instead as a site of potential. Having lost his vision in his right eye in a shooting accident when he was 13, Spence was eventually covering his eye with a patch to conceal the disfiguration that his non-functioning eye had developed. After receiving a prosthetic eye that only served an aesthetic purpose, Spence decided to enlist the help of engineers to design a camera that could be implanted into his eye socket, with the capability to transmit data wirelessly.6 Calling himself an “Eyeborg,” Spence follows in the footsteps of artists like Stelarc, who believes that the design of the human body is obsolete,8 and engineers like Steve Mann, who has long been a proponent of wearable technology. While placing a video camera in one’s eye has obvious implications regarding surveillance and privacy (and indeed this is an issue Spence hopes to illustrate),9 it also extends the capabilities of sight and memory. Because a camera is designed after the inherent function of the eye, Spence is re-articulating not only his physical body by implanting a technological camera into his eye socket, he is also making physical the neurological process of storing memory. Theoretically, if Spence were to keep his eye camera on, recording what he sees for 24 hours a day, he will have essentially designed a flawless memory, without relying on his brain to store and recall moments, conversations, disputes. In the realm of surveillance, this means back up.
The notion of “back up” surveillance has already been explored by Steve Mann as a subversive response to the proliferation of public watching that is enacted by institutions under the guise of preventing crime and terrorism. But it was Spence who envisioned it as an extension of his physical self (rather than as an accessory for his physical self). Coined by Mann as “sousveillance,” or inverse surveillance, the process involves bottom-up surveillance by ordinary citizens who would wear cameras in order to balance the number of surveillance mechanisms that exist in public space. Mann finds the justification for institutional surveillance to be extremely problematic, noting that an open-loop formula drives surveillance:
…without the normal feedback mechanisms that provide important checks and balances. Feedback is the simple process of observability-controllability like we find in a home thermostat. When the homeland gets too hot, the thermostat provides the checks and balances needed to shut off the furnace. But the secret burners under the political pressure cookers have no thermostat—nothing to keep them in a state of equilibrium or balance…10
It is not privacy that is the cause of the problem. It is not the unphotographed, unfingerprinted, unsurveilled citizens who are to blame, but, rather, it is the larger pressure cooking machinery that needs to be questioned.
By creating his personal experience-record as an Eyeborg, Spence becomes a perpetual sousveiller where the apparatus of recording is actually embedded directly into his physical body. Spence can expand on Mann’s idea of wearable technology precisely because he has an empty eye socket in which to install it. Extending the body in such a way not only addresses the political issues raised by Mann regarding surveillance in the public sphere, but also allows Spence, as an artist, to reinvent the tools of his profession as a documentary filmmaker. The potential allowed by Spence’s disability enables him to transform into a cyborg in a way than an able-bodied person cannot.
One of the anecdotes that Mullins shares during her talk at the TED conference is of a friend who encountered her for the first time since she acquired her new prosthetics that elevated her to a looming 6’1”. After Mullins described how great it was for her prosthetics to allow for variable height, her friend exclaimed, “But it’s not fair!”11 This exchange reveals the tension that able-bodied people feel upon the realization that “disability” means nothing of the sort; that technology and science enable those that are traditionally deemed as lacking, or as having lost, to extend the abilities of their bodies beyond any natural human function.
I believe that an increased cross-disciplinary focus will make a place for itself in the future of Conceptual art, where the overlap of medicine, science, technology and art coalesce to expand our understandings of identity, the potential of the body and conversations about beauty and aesthetics. Concepts of the bionic or robotic body are always pitted against the moral implications of augmenting traditional and romantic notions of the natural body. The latter half of this dichotomy, however, already presupposes that the disabled body is not natural, which is why there is so much vocabulary to define it—to assign it as a difference from the expected forms and functions of a human body. What is challenging about the disabled body as an opportunity for an extra-abled body is that suddenly—and this is what glues people to the romanticism of the natural body—those of us without defects and deformations suddenly become less-abled than the body that can extend itself beyond human capacity.
Notes:
1 Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005: 7.
2 Hopkins, David. After Modern Art, 1945-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 245.
3 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.” TED Conference. Monterrey, California. Feb. 2009. TED. Mar. 2009. 31 Mar. 2009 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Spence, Rob. The Eyeborg Project. 04 Apr. 2009 http://www.eyeborgproject.com.
7 Birringer, Johannes H. Media & Performance: Along the Border. JHU Press, 1998. 61-62.
8 Mann, Steve. WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/.
9 Ganapati, Priya. “Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket.” Wired Blogs. 4 Dec. 2008. 03 Apr. 2009 http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html.
10 Mann, Steve. “Sousveillance” WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm/.
11 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.”
Image: Screenshot of Aimee Mullins’s TED talk.
