Stelarc, Prosthetic head [2003]

DOING NEO'S WORK ANDREW MACKENZIE If the popularity of The Matrix series of movies tells us anything [its relentless pursuit of so little not withstanding], it is that technology lends itself to the schizophrenia of being both witness to and perpetrators of demonic forces. The fetish product of digital craft, its story reiterates a world of ruthless, blinking digits, locked in combat with the world of corporeal humanity, whose annihilation defines its cold-hearted raison d'etre. The dichotomy of film as both the vehicle for and accuser of technology is hardly new. Certainly, without a ready audience for such battles with techno-deviancy, it's likely that the current governor of California, ex purveyor of fine prosthetics, would still be sniffing around the hinterland of LA adult publishing. Assisted by our insatiable fear and appetite, film continues to exploit our fascination with the omnipotent evil of technology and its predilection for total control, now of heightened capacity since the quaint, old Orwellian world of ocular surveillance has given way to the new order - the virtual eye. Thus reflected at the box office, our vacillations with technology are split between hysterical fear and evangelical zeal. Technology, we think, will either mush our brains and destroy humanity, or deliver us a longer-living, happier, egalitarian global village. Of course neither is true. Those who claim that screen violence begets physical violence have not read their bloody history. At the same time, our open-access global village is inevitably sustained by the same logic of economic self-interest that has driven modernity for centuries. There are, for instance, more internet connections on the island of Manhattan than on the entire continent of Africa. Reality as usual, is somewhere in the middle - a boring place without fear or zeal. Struggling with these extremes, digital/screen art has its own set of well-rehearsed battles to fight. Most challenging is the problem of how an ethereal medium of animated pixels and dots, dancing across a screen, might register the presence of a body, contra "the link between visuality, tactility and the body that has been so fundamental to what we have called art".1 After all, the discipline of art has been performative for millenia, compelled by the making of a mark, the tracing of movement, the physical articulation and translation of the senses. Against which, an art form generated by the click of a mouse, while the artist remains transfixed and motionless before a screen, though ubiquitous, is no less an ongoing challenge to the overwhelming tradition of art's visceral and phenomenological creation. The disembodiment that this art practice suggests is less a paradigm shift than a category refinement of photography's already negotiated place in the pantheon of art. However, the synthesising qualities of the digital image, moving or otherwise, increasingly render an entirely constructed world, a world unto itself, arguably distinct from the referred world of photography as recorded document.2 And in the world of art we are still less than convinced that this virtual world is a benign one. So, while the rest of the world becomes ever more naturalised to a programmed and pliable space marshalled by semi-conductors [in our games, computers, flat screens, phones and fridges] the electronic/digital arts, in traditional terms an inhuman presence, appear both artistically innovative and at the same time culturally inevitable, if not already passé. This might go some distance to explain the strange antinomy that inflects the 'public's' relationship with an institution such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, or indeed any venture engaged in the art of technology-mediated images [the parentheses acknowledging a 'public' often framed by the media and therefore at best partisan]. For while ACMI has thus far had little trouble achieving, indeed exceeding, its 'bums on seats' bottom line, it continues to suffer accusations of elitism, sophistry and impenetrable avant-gardism. It is however an ironic reality that a visit to this citadel of techno-esoterics increasingly involves waiting in a queue. The place is run amok with hands-on twelve year olds, transfixed oldies and tourists challenged by the language but engrossed by the quiet transcendence of a large screen wherein a small bird nests inside the mouth of artist Robert Gligorov, pondering flight. While certainly the viscerality of these moving images provide potent engagement for the daily hordes, from what I can see, there is little of the flipside 'enervation' by which Terry Smith ascribes the contemporary image's diminished power to communicate.3 On the contrary, as one descends into the dim subterranean world in which the senses are no longer bombarded by the street, but are open, receptive and curious, the body appears as a sustained presence. Against the above-mentioned dystopic fear of technology - essentially a threat to the corporeal - it becomes clear that the explicit success of ACMI and much of the digital/screen arts it presents is an effect of its mission impossible to sensualise technology. And so Transfigure, ACMI's fourth major exhibition [curated by Senior Producer/Curator Alessio Cavallaro] can be seen to tackle head on this fundamentally problematic sensuality of the electronic, the digital and the filmic moving image. Despite the subtitle Perception, body, space and landscape transformed by the moving image, even those works overtly engaged with landscape imagery are infused with a plastic physicality betraying the presence of the artist. Vikki Wilson's palimpsestic Superpermanance, Steina Vasulka's seminal experiments with plasticity in Orka, Char Davies' intensely interactive and immersive visual environments Ephemere and Osmose, attest to an engaging sensuality that is far from enervated. Placed both physically and thematically at the centre of the exhibition, Infected by Gina Czarnecki in collaboration with dancer Iona Kewney, seemed to capture the exhibition's latent dichotomy most thoroughly. Kewney's naked body of turns, twists and extemporises a slow crouching sequence of movements. Confined within a circular projection screen the dancer moves with the distracted, disorientated impatience of a caged bear. As the film progresses, the image is manipulated. The figure stutters, jumps, blurs, is broken. We observe this deformation as if by electronic interference, static or some such image corruption, as analogous to the deterioration of this once he, controlled body, as it descends into trauma. There is something of the tortured, hallucinatory figures and distraught sexuality of Francis Bacon haunting this work, destined to repeat its infection in perpetuity. That infection is synonymous with the sexual only compounds this association. Eroticism is reasserted in a synthetic coupling directed by Chris Cunningham for the Bjork track 'All is Full of Love'. Described by Cunningham in the exhibition's media release as the "kama sutra meets industrial robotics", the video shows two robotic arms slowly fabricating two self-similar cyborgs [montaged with the singing face of Bjork], which ends with an embrace of caressing hydraulics and servo motors. As with his more recent Flex, [his first 'non-commercial' project since moving out of the music industry and into a gallery setting], his video for Bjork is a meticulously produced study of love, anatomy, sex and technology, in which white light itself, swamping the scene, seems to be one of the characters. With an exhibition title such as this, it is hard not to associate Transfigure with the biblical Transfiguration, when Christ radiated white light upon Peter, James and John [the reason for which, as I understand it, was to show them who was boss]. Though admittedly oblique, I'm reminded of Jean Baudrillard's 'white magic, white light' film analogy. As I watch Cunningham's video assembling itself [composed in a pure infinite luminosity, shadowless, sourceless and intense], accompanied by the voice of Bjork in transcendent enrapture repeating "all is full of love, all is full of love", I can see why this remains, some years after its production, one of the most respected and enjoyed music video clips of the generation. Placed in a room by itself, and stubbornly resisting transcendence of any sort, sits Stelarc's Prosthetic Head. In his on-going exploration into the human body's mortal frailty, Stelarc aims to make the next step, from a body assisted by prosthetic enhancement [the third arm, the third ear - the bastard exterminator of obsolescence] into a virtual presence in which the body as a corporeal entity has disappeared altogether. In its place, his wire-framed, skinned and toned head, monstrously large, engages in stilted conversation with the viewer, responding to questions and answers input by the viewer on a keyboard. Listening to the almost adequate conversation is like witnessing the early technology of anything - awkward, convoluted and excessive. It seems trapped within its own spatial limits, remaining a representation rather than an occupation of place, which is perhaps the point. Similarly Acmipark [a virtual extension of Federation Square using the literacy of gaming technology, by the collaborative team selectparks Australia] though ostensibly the most overtly interactive part of the exhibition, was the least visceral. Like Prosthetic Head, it too is locked in a vectorised virtual space, the experience of which is always at a distance. In Acmipark its visual spatiality owes much to the contained, rationalised space of modernity, where "perspective is still the rule... objects are still conceived and represented within all the three-dimensional conventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century practice. Ostensibly, there is little to distinguish Alberti's window from a computer screen".4 These are minor quibbles, however, in a collection of fifteen varied works [too many to do justice to here] that encompass a large bite of the moving image's plastic possibilities. Everything is here, from the most abstracted and formalist video experiments, to the highest hi-tech special effects, to molecular modelling, gaming technology, medical interrogation, dance, music, programming and, finally, Robert Gligorov's ponderous bird awaiting flight. As I write this, The Age newspaper has once again criticised ACMI in what is becoming a repetitive force of habit. In response to reported financial difficulties, comparisons are made, both budgetry and [cloaked in sly rhetorical language] aesthetic, with NGV Australia across the atrium. In either case the comparisons are more illusory than illuminating. Once again we are led to believe that maybe we're not ready for something so avant-garde, that its program is too risky. Indeed, following what seems to be a deadly logic that privileges the museological role of the gallery to contain the objects of our painterly tradition, this might seem so. But as a place that embraces the language, the experiences, the visuality and a certain redefined viscerality of our not-so-brave new world, ACMI remains singular and clear about its curatorial necessity. There are executive problems that do need addressing. The fact that not one of the exhibitions so far has attracted a major sponsor is an issue. That the ground floor remains empty and deserted, betraying stalled plans, is an issue. Of immediate concern, that an exhibition such as Transfigure is not accompanied by a catalogue or publication, is an unconscionable omission. Given operating costs of $15m, the fact that this exhibition is accompanied with a leaflet is frankly, a joke. Finally, even on a public relations level, the 'unavailable for comment' chief executive John Smithies, who remains on long service leave, despite all the travails and looming fiscal clouds, does not foster an image of commitment and perseverance. These serious executive and managerial problems need immediate and decisive action, not delegation. But this does not diminish the fact that, as a place that meets and confronts the pulsating hybrid world of mediated images in which we swim, it offers the possibility, the encouragement, to translate, transform and transfigure. In so doing, it is an antidote to those nightmares of machines that take over. Neo would indeed, be proud. The body is not lost. Notes 1 Griselda Pollock in Karen Raney [ed.], Art in Question, New York: Continuum, 2003: 141 2 G. Kress and T. van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The grammar of visual design, London: Routledge, 1996: 233 3 Terry Smith [ed.], Impossible Presence: Surface and screen in the photogenic era, University of Chicago Press, 2001 4 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space, Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2001: 7