Assignment 3 - embodiment

Virtual Alpine Challenge is a 3D reality video game that is different than the other snowboarding video games on the market. It features a virtual reality helmet that simulates incredibly real looking terrain. Additionally, the interface allows one to select whichever course they want to play, and connect through WiFi to gain access to additional terrains and parks once the user has completed the 50 that the game initially comes with.

The beam that holds the deck is incredibly responsive; it raises, lowers and swivels based on the riders preference, pressure and stance to allow for maximum room for any angels the user wishes to achieve. None of the other snowboarding games on the market have a life-size deck or bindings to hold the user in, which means that it cannot feel very real or simulate the sport properly. The large deck and bindings (which one should be wearing shoes before stepped into) allows the avid snowboarder to keep up their muscle definition and skill even in the off season.

Presentation: Embodiment & ORLAN

             Embodiment can refer to so many different things, and we don’t even really have a solid and workable definition of everything that it can encompass in relation to our course yet. But we know one thing for certain, and that is that it will absolutely border on art, technology and society. When I initially set out to do this presentation, my ideas of embodiment in art was basically just that it was installation art which would combine the body and physical space, with some computing and digital technology in the mix. But there are some artists who combine installation art with performance art in a new way, and that is by physically becoming their art using  new technologies that were not available in the past. 

 When I was looking at this one artists work in particular, it evoked ideas in my mind about Cyborgs. Professor Stedmen even said in lecture yesterday that generally the first thing one thinks about when combining people and technology are cyborgs. So for my presentation, I am going to be looking at the themes of embodiment and feminism by using the artist Orlan’s work. I decided to do this because when I was looking at her art and listening to her interviews, I was reminded of Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto because they share certain philosophical views.

                 Orlan is a French artist who was born in 1947. She uses a variety of mediums including performance art, as well multimedia in the form of video and digital photography. She has gone beyond conventional artists who use their body in their art and had surgeries performed which she calls “Orlan Carnal Art.” The plastic surgery she has undergone changed her face in a way that defies traditional ideas of beauty; she used surgery as a medium to communicate her views on beauty standards. Furthermore, she turns each of her surgeries into a live performance piece by staying awake during the operation, having it recorded and broadcast, and even reads aloud and answers questions while it is going on.

 This is Orlan when she was younger, before any of the surgeries took place. Examples of her early work show how she used her body in her art and how she uses it differently now.

                 At first it may seem that Orlan is just another example of a woman getting plastic surgery to try to conform to a set of beauty standards, and that combining technology and her flesh is just something excessive that is typical, and almost to be expected in our modern-day society. 







However, if we look closer we can see that this is not the case, because when she talks about cosmetic surgery as a whole, she says that she is not against it, it is a technique of our time, but that she is against its attempts to standardize people. She uses it in an entirely different way, as she tries to use it to cultivate an individual identity, not to construct beauty in the way of dominant ideologies.

 These philosophies about beauty standards and the way she goes about attempting to challenge them is also what sets her apart from other artists who work in the same mediums as she does, such as Stelarc, because the art that she does explores different themes. The issues that her art explores are feminist in nature. Someone like Sterlac’s work such as the ear on arm is using a similar medium to Orlan via the way of surgery, but his goals and what he is trying portray are entirely different from hers. Stelarc explores wanting to extend the bodies operational capabilities. 

                Orlan’s work follows a certain methodology, each operation she has performed is chosen very deliberately. When referring to all nine surgical performances it is entitled “The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan.” Each surgery has a specific theme, which is revealed during the process as Orlan reads aloud literature and philosophy. “The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan” began when she created a composite image on the computer that combined her face with the faces of famous women in art history. Their portraits represent idealized femininity from different time periods, and it was that digital image that served as the basis for the cosmetic surgeries that she would take on.

“One of her objectives was to embody the enduring visions of beauty created by renowned painters throughout history. She accomplished this seemingly impossible goal by surgically replicating the most cherished facial feature as it was presented in each famous artist’s most revered artwork.   For example, she has the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men, but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty and notions of fertility; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future.” (http://www.irasabs.com/?tag=orlans-plastic-surgery-performances) 

                 Orlan does this to her body to critique notions of beauty which she feels are due to male power structures. In Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway takes the same stance but she uses the metaphor of the cyborg to say that something we think is a natural, like human bodies, are not natural, but are constructed by our ideas about them. Haraway believes that women are often discussed or treated in ways that reduce them to bodies, which is reflected in Orlan’s work as well. Both of their works make the audience examine the role of the body in contemporary digital art and culture, but Orlan takes it a step further and actually physically alters herself, and because of the technological means attached to what she does, she is in a sense becoming post-human, or a cyborg.

Its not just about the type of art she is doing on her physical body, (lots of artists have used their bodies as a canvas before) but also the way she chooses to broadcast the art using technology to increase her stage and performance.

In the end, it is difficult to distinguish Orlan’s life from her art because her art has become her life, which to me is a strong characteristic of what embodiment is. 

Bibliography:

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ1Ph-Pprj4

2) http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/akman.htm

3) http://www.irasabs.com/?tag=orlans-plastic-surgery-performances

4) http://www.orlan.net/works/performance/
5)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan

Assignment 2 – Networks/Website:

For the Code and Networks assignment I did a visual representation of all of my classes. 

I wanted to explore the interactivity and relationship between networks by grouping together websites that would otherwise not be connected to one another through me, because as far as I know I am the only one who has my particular class schedule, and therefore the only one who visits all of these websites that are now linked together. 

They are websites that I have to visit all of the time and that I am very used to seeing, and the FACS homepage is one that is recognizable to everyone in this class as well.

Assignment # 2 - Homepage

(additional note: probably best viewed in FireFox.)

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Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody vs. Malcolm Gladwell's Small Change

 It Takes A Village To Find A Phone 

In the first chapter of Clay Shirky's book, he is right to ask what defines a cause as being right. In the case of a stolen cell phone, it was not relevant that there were threads started on the forum where users asked each other if Sasha was attractive enough to sleep with, but that is part of the give and take with making something like this public with the anonymity of the internet. Many people are inclined to get off topic and stray from the facts; is it fair that Sasha became the target of this sexualized conversation because of a phone? Some might say it is no different than if she were walking down the street and a group eyeballed her and started the same conversation topic about whether they’d “tap that”, and others might say she provoked this type of conversation, especially due to the fact that she had a Myspace page. As the author points out that, having this online persona greatly increases our social visibility, which can have both positive effects (ease with finding each others) and negative ones (being scrutinized by the public). This subtopic was one of the many surrounding the original issue, and overall many of the subtopics take away from the actual issue at hand which all in all weakens the overall cause, and makes it hard to define if this cause is indeed just. 

Additionally, the author emphasises the need for socialization amongst humans – in his own words, “not occasionally or by accident but always” which I don’t know if I would agree with entirely. For the most part sure, but there are some people and some times where humans have no desire to form connections amongst each other. Does the interface of the internet change this? I don’t think so. Even though it may seem like its all about connectivity at times if for no other reason than the series of networks that connect a laptop (and thereby, an individual) to the rest of the web/world is being implemented, this doesn’t show a need to form connections to other people as the internet can be just as isolating as the real world.

Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted

In this article, author Malcolm Gladwell says that "Social media can’t provide what social change has always required." He compares the civil rights movement with recent online campaigns targeting Iranian political issues, and it is obvious from both tone and text that he believes activism has not only gotten soft, but that we seem to have forgotten what it is all about entirely. This is clearly emphasized though his examples, such as when one Mark Pfeifle (a former national-security adviser) called for "Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize," which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all day, and I sincerely hope he was joking or misunderstood but sadly feel that he was not. 

Which argument is more convincing and why

After reading these two articles, I have to say that I am inclined to agree with the latter article, that being Malcolm Gladwell's Small Change. His ideas are more along the lines of my own in that I do not believe social change can be generated through the internet. He asks, "Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?" The obvious answer is "clearly not," but I do no think the majority of internet users/facebook addicts would agree. Some of the examples the author uses remind me of many of

 the recent facebook trends that get people to do things like put their bra colour into their status updates, because it supposedly supports breast cancer campaigns. “What?!” and “How?!” are the only things that spring to my mind. Even if their purpose is just to raise awareness, that’s great…but what is the point and who is that actually benefiting? Like in the article, all the people from the West who were posting on Twitter about the event surrounding the Iranian election for the most part actually had nothing to do with it, because they do not actually live there. 

mini assignment - our remix on our website

link to mini assignment.

Remix assignment

For this assignment I chose to create two videos and one still image.

Part 1:



The above was a remix of several Alice in Wonderland themed media, including Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland, Avril Lavigne's music video for "Alice", and Paramore's "Brick by Boring Brick." As well, there are clips from a short entitled "The Fairies of Blackheath Woods", which is not about Alice, but is another example of the little girl archetype who runs away into the forest and gets lost.

The still image is meant to create a space where the fantasy world collides with reality, and to work as a transition piece between the two videos. The top portrays elements of time and correlates to the first video about childhood fantasy, which is something that typically has a limited shelf life and is eventually grown out of. However, the middle is a confused time and space that is existing between fantasy and reality. Tea parties are real but this one is mad; a girl who is living in a fairytale and running towards a castle; a woman is trying to escape her life through the looking glass.
The lower part of the collage correlates to the second video. It depicts a version of reality in which these girls were thought to be insane because of their wild imaginations, and eventually were confined to The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (a book by Emilie Autumn).
The castle that is central in many fairy tales is meant to be juxtaposed with the asylum;  in many cases they look very similar from the outside but are obviously very different places inside.

Part 2:



The final piece is all about madness - and how the fantastical worlds and dreams these little girls experienced never went away, and as they grew up they were deemed insane because they did not behave exactly as young women 'should'.
It cuts back and forth between childhood and adulthood.

Nuit Blanche

My experiences with Nuit Blanche every year are basically the same - tonnes of build-up; extreme letdown. Every year features more and more people than the last, most of whom are out to see the spectacle of the city being open all night, as opposed to actually appreciate art. 

But since every year I say I'm going to look up specific installations and travel around to them rather than aimlessly wander all night and see where I end up, and every year I fail to do so, I guess I can't complain. 

The large crowds make it really hard to navigate anywhere or stop to look at anything for too long, and when I do get a chance, I find a lot of of the works pretty random ... (and not necessarily in a good way.) 

Like this one: 

"Meeting Point: After a planner whose search for new forms pays tribute to existing and familiar places."

Whereas I was like, "There's a giant brick of cheese in that field!"

However, one of my favourite creations of the night was Matt King's Streetfigher II: 

Performers play an altered Nintendo game with modified controllers that play instruments and run a video projection.

                   Incredible! 

I would have never thought it would be possible to rewire a Nintendo keyboard to hook up to a drum set and a keyboard. Duking it out Streetfighter style while playing musical instruments is kinda legendary. 

Video games and music in combination this way is a really awesome remixing of art forms, something more classic with something more contemporary.