I really appreciate what Hansen is saying about the ability of digital media to affect our bodies and sense of space to brutally simplify what he says.
My main problem with his essay is the way that he goes about explaining his ideas. Yes they are complicated; but I do not feel his choice of language does the best to describe what he wants conveyed. I know I am not the best at reading comprehension, but I have made it this far so I must be okay and I feel one very important part of writing that I do not seem to notice enough in scholarly writing is explanations that put the same idea into other words. Confusing me never convinces me and at times in this essay I just felt confused. Sorry for my frustrations but I wish that some of these authors would write in ways to reach both scholars and the less educated. I always find important ideas but I find myself digging them out of sentences filled with former's and latter's.
I am not sure that this quality that Hansen speaks of in Lazzarini's work is something that is only present in the digital or that the digital makes this mode of working assessable. I have never seen any of Richard Serra's large scale sculptures that us techniques of shipbuilding to assemble but I am sure that when in their presence I would have a disembodied feeling similar to the skulls of Lazzarini. Where my space may feel different from the space around the sculpture.
"In presenting us with a space from which our movement is radically excluded, skulls effectuates a divergence between vision and proprioception that cannot be resolved through a synesthetic realignment."229 What I think that Hansen is saying is that skulls effects our space by the way that our vision is unable to perceive the skull in a way that makes sense with the space that our bodies occupy. I am not totally sure if this is what he is trying to say because he says it in a way that I have difficulty translating. If what he is saying is that because these skulls are unlike anything in our space that they throw our space out of balance, to me this makes sense.
"Rather than yielding to a mode of visuality consistent with sculptural form, the complex folds and hollows of these warped skulls generate a total short-circuiting of vision and a violent feeling of spatial constriction that manifest, literally, as a haptic experience of the space of the body."230
I think i can put enough of his scholarly language together to make a sentence that i can comprehend and that i would say that i agree with. That is that Skulls is a sculpture that you see with your vision but the shape of the skull is not consistent with the shape of space that we understand so it throws not only our vision off, but our whole body and balance. If this is what Hansen is trying to say I think that he overcomplicated a fairly simple idea that someone that might not understand his essay could easily comprehend.
“But after the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place… That in my view, is the sole serious question to face humanity today.”
He doesn’t show any evidence as to why he believes this to be the most serious question. Myself, I find this question not worth the time or effort to stress or even think about. So what, thought won’t go on without the sun… a lot of other stuff won’t happen either. Would somehow answering this question help us at all? In a way it is a yes or no answer. Yes it can… so what, bodies do not exist. No it can’t… so why should it. It is so much like last weeks question about body and mind separation. Why would these two things be separate and what do we a have to gain by separating them. Thought without bodies, what good is that?
Virtual reality, or what is commonly referred to as virtual reality, seems as though it could open new creative ways of learning and telling stories. The problems that I had with these articles are their need for a strict limited definition.
Another problems is this idea that the body and the mind are somehow two different things like one could exist separately without the other, which does not really make sense. If what we know in our mind is taken in through our senses then to me senses and mind are close enough that trying to separated does not get you very far.
They are so interconnected I would almost consider them to be the same thing or at least the mind is part of the body but not separate.
Trying to separate the body from the mind or “upload” consciousness is kind of like trying to remove a flower from photosynthesis. Without a plant how could it occur the same with the mind, without a body where would consciousness exist. Sorry may not the best analogy.
I think that virtual reality will open the door for all kinds of new ways of learning and experimenting. To me that type of virtual reality is more virtual to me than someone with one of those headsets on walking around a “virtual” environment that does not compare to ours whatsoever.
To me games such as second life is not useful for discussion of virtuality. The game or way the game is controlled does not mimic ways on which life is controlled. What I am trying to say as that in the category of games as virtuality I would say that a flight simulator that shares common controls with actual flight is a more productive way of using worlds like virtual.
What I find interesting about bio art is the way that it tries to imitate nature. Much of pre-modern art was very interested in this. From musculature and posture on old classical statues, to the depiction of space and light in the renaissance, to modern photography. Much of art is about trying to reproduce and mimic the world around us. With bio art is opens this possibility to a whole another level. This gives humans the chance to create in a medium that would have been almost uncomprehendable to most of art history. Was part of the Greeks goal to make statues look real as possible, almost if the person was standing there? Was the part of renaissance painting trying to make a convincing window to our own world with paint? Bio gives artist the chance to create with the real living material.
Much pre-modern art was quite scientific. Not scientific by standards of today, but much of art was very cutting edge in its own time. Classical sculpture and anatomy. Renaissance with mathematical systems of space and reflections of light. Vermeer and his technologies with lenses. The camera, previously the most scientific way of capturing nature.
Problems; much does not benefit you at all but others, such as the genetically modified chicken, it is not better for you it is better for the farmer, or same with the corn. The cow is better suited for the slaughter not the consumer.
Bio art should be used more as a critique
I think this medium/discourse of art need to be looked at very ethically. Not because I feel that the artists are “playing god”, but I feel that is important that they know who that are working for and make sure that it is more on the art side than the research side, especially the big business research side.
I have no problem with artists “playing god”. To me there is nothing ethically wrong with that. What is wrong is when the playing of god is used as a means to profit one individual over another. The biology needs to offer an equality of benefits to us all and not just to a few.
Bio art can be a useful way to protest and cause attention to genetic engineering.
Bio art can be used as a way to voice protest in an obvious way. Bio art can also be used to ask ethical questions that science or technology itself cannot ask in the same way that Art can.
Week 4
Sorry for my scattered writing, when I was thinking about this I was going back and forth between articles
If I use a computer or some mechanical interface to communicate with someone is that not a cyborg. Is all Internet communication cybernetic? It would be the ideas of humans but it would be expressed and received through a machine. Does this qualify as the hybrid that Haraway speaks of?
Can cyber feminism only exist cyberly, or I mean through the Internet or some other non-personal communication. Could cyber feminism work face to face? If it could not would this lead to an end to personal relations. Like no one would actually know who anyone really was. Is this already true today, the Internet gives you a possibility with My space, facebook, youtube, blogs, many more.
When I communicate on the Internet I am communicating with other cyborgs. All these cyborgs on the Internet were created by real people putting out an individual that is not themselves (as in their real self), but a creation of theirs. A cyborg on the Internet is a persona of a real person, this persona does not exist outside the Internet (questionable), and the person is not the same as persona. What and who is this personality on the Internet. It is individual in its humanness and mechanical in its existence. Is this artificial life? If this could be considered artificial life then it is far different then the kind of artificial life from science fiction.
With Alife, the life that is evolved does not evolve like we evolve it evolves in a controlled environment that was created by us and only evolves in this environment They created an environment where evolution can take place. Does this mean that life is created as a result of their created evolution? Can life be created without evolution? Would something be life that did not evolve? If life must evolve then life could never be created only evolution could create life. Then the closest thing to life that could be created is a type of evolution not the “life” that exists as a result of the evolution.
This type of living that emerges from a computer program is different from what I think of as life. The life that exists on a computer only exists in this artificial environment. I am not sure whether it is a question if the life is artificial or not but whether the environment is artificial. If you call the environment artificial then yes the life that is produced out of it is also artificial. Humans produce the program and the operating system in which it runs, so for me it is artificial. I do not feel it would be correct to simply call this life. It is far more of an imitation of life that exists in a network made by human skills.
“Artificial life deals with, or rather deals in virtual reality through the construction of biological simulations which may be said to multiply, curtail and supplant the possibilities of the natural world.” pg. 58-59 a paraphrase from Baudrillard-1989
Haraway suggests the use of irony to build a language for cyber feminism; some of these possible ironies come up in Kember’s writing. “The Alife scientist, in this account, may be characterized (perhaps caricatured) as an engineer masquerading as a scientist, a creationist masquerading as an evolutionist, a constructivist masquerading as a naturalist.
“In order to create artificial life, it is first necessary to redefine life as artificial.”(pg60). This would be a redefinition of life, “in a way that does not restrict it to carbon-based forms”. (pg60). I am not sure if redefining words is the best way to describe something. If you change the definition of life then yes life can be synthesized but this life that is synthesized is different from pervious ideas of what life is, which changes the meaning of the word and whatever life was will no longer be the same.
Why is it necessary to label this synthesized form of digital life as life. What is life, if evolution could be programmed then it makes sense that through that life would emerge. But is that life from the program the same life as the word means in its carbon based version. I think what I might be confused about is artificial life is not life, it is artificial life and they are not the same. They may share May similar qualities but are different.
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