Issue #20
Winter/Spring 2000
Technology and the Body
Mystified, awed and terrified still by the concept of the telephone, I fall into a lazy, dull acceptance of the technology that is offered to me. I want more. I have a deep need to understand it and be on top of it... move into the sexy world o f- I don't really know what to call it, but you know all those shaved headed DJ boys... spinning discs... walking around with finger size camera-looking objects that contain moving images that they will later plug in and digitally alter (I think). I want to be one of those boys with those sexy machines... I want to digitally alter things and then spin on my head...be at new media central...even know for sure what new media is...I want to have to sample my life or experience it through headphones... know what DVD means or HRD or TIFF... but am terrified... cannot find the way in... not sure if I am terrified of the language, of the apparatus, of the void of virtual reality itself or if the fear stems from the deep legacy of my mother who fears machines to such an extent that she will not leave a message on an answering machine, neither will she pump her own gas, driving sometimes as much as 20 miles out of her way to find a small man in a small garage who still, in 1999, offers a service like that.
We fight about it my mother and I... perhaps because I feel it is a gender referential stance, that she as a woman depending on a man to pump her gas is pathetic... I would never allow that. Here I am though allowing those Techno boys to pump my virtual/digital gas every day. And how would it feel if my father were the one who couldn't pump his gas?
Now, we need to do almost nothing with one finger to achieve a huge result... we don't need the car, the plane. Soon machines will enter the body, rejuvenation will happen constantly and internally; we will not need face creams or plastic surgery or blood transfusions; we will think our phone calls and we won't need the phone. Certainly the messy procreation problem will have been solved in a petri dish or in a digital reality somewhere. So will we need the body carbon or silicon... and what will my mother do when we disappear?
Editorial team
Contributing Editor
Kathy Westwater - Sarah Michelson
Jana DeWitt
Contributor
Stelarc - Jeremy Wade - Trajal Harrell - Laura Frost - Kimberly Bartosik - George Emilio Sanchez - Johannes Birringer - Mark Coniglio - Dawn Stoppiello - Troika Ranch - Mark Robison - Sally Silvers - Lucy Sexton - Geary Buxton - Toni Dove - Kathy Westwater - Kenneth King - Orlan - Merián Soto - Charlotte Cullinan - Martha Wilson - Douglas Rosenberg - Peggy Phelan - Andy Clarke - Grethe Mitchell
Articles
Letters from the Editors
Mystified, awed and terrified still by the concept of the telephone, I fall into a lazy, dull acceptance of the technology that is offered to me. I want more. I...
Letters to the Editors
To the Editors: I wanted to point out an error in the article on Nancy Topf on page 13 of the MR winter/spring 99 journal. The article mentions that Nancy...
Body Image
Like an unreachable itch pulling the wrong way. A hotness that's buried like an underground river. And it's going upstream, against the flow. Leeches have an anesthetic bite, ensuring a...
The Morphing of The Body
Having developed a Third Hand, the body is considering the possibility of constructing an extra ear, positioned next to the real ear. A laser scan was done to create a...
Wired Bodies Becoming Cartoon
Throughout history, dance is in conversation with contemporary culture and technology, responding to as well as defying cultural form. The city of New York is an epicenter for electronic music...
Technodelux*
Since the Renaissance, the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface...
An Interview with Steve Reich
Steve Reich is a composer who has written music of incredible dexterity, formal complexity, and at times even austerity, but he has done this inclusive of a powerful response to...
Circuits of Desire (excerpt)
Nineteenth Century technology seems to have been designed to inspire eroticism; the steamy thrust of a locomotive, the vibrating pistons of an internal-combustion engine, not to mention the safety pin,...
Technogenderbody
“A machine has no sex. Nature, on the other hand, always has a sex.” “The human spirit…seems subjugated to the imperatives of technology to the point of believing it possible...
Aborting Elevation: A talk with Yvonne Rainer
I first met Yvonne Rainer in 1987 in her apartment when I auditioned for her for her film "Privilege". The world knows I didn't get the part. This past summer...
Moving Through Technologies
We no longer work in dance studios, we work in interactive environments, our labs become scientific simulation-chambers, we have more in common with NASA than with the Judson Church but...
Perfect Chaos and The Electronic Body
The word that the two of us return to again and again in our work is body. There is nothing more essentially human than the body. It is sensual, tactile,...
Real Time
Lately Character Generators, the video documentation company I head, has leapt into the digital world, rocking our daily routine. One receives a tremendous insight looking into the unknown as technology...
Press Me I Juice
"Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" --Donna Haraway Preface: Attempting to perform Donna Haraway's Utopian social vision of the cyborg (a hybrid of a body and...
The Naked Truth or Less is More
Never underestimate the power of the naked body. Especially in public. Anne Iobst and I, performing as DANCENOISE, first got buck naked at an Alien Comic-produced Columbus Day show at...
The Future of Dance Documentation Technology
We live in a fascinating age of desktop and hand-held computer miracles, an age where any three-dimensional, real-time, moving image can be created on the screen. At the beginning of...
The Virtual Double
I live my body in danger as regards menacing machines as well as manageable instruments. My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar...
Images: An Interview with Cathy Weis
When I look around at artists experimenting with dance and technology, few are as innovative with the two media as Cathy Weis. After a dance career that included performing with...
Digital Body/Millennial Wor(l)d
The human body is poised to undergo unprecedented digital transformations that will create another frontier of corporeal extensions comparable to the technological advances that have changed the entire physical landscape...
Plastic Surgery as Performance Art
No Regrets: Access and Legitimacy
What happens when marginal artists appropriate techniques and technology of the dominant culture? Can performance works that deal with working class subject matter of Latinos and popular forms be taken...
Go into the Gallery
Go into the Gallery down a corridor, past the electric towers that power the place, into the main vast space. Here is a constructed pistol range made with plywood and...
No Mistakes: An Interview with Merce Cunningham
For the 60 years of his professional dance career Merce Cunningham has set benchmarks for innovations of the form. His status is no less formidable with respect to technology. This...
Going Virtual
I wish that I could say that Franklin Furnace's evolution from an avant-garde presenter to a virtual institution was a conscious, planned and steady process, but it was not. Moments...
Technology and Cultural Amnesia: The Art of Forgetting (excerpt)
Documentation oscillates between the signifier and the thing signified. As much of performance traditionally has a very short shelf-life, documentation of seminal works far outlives its "original". Thus, the copy,...
Excerpt From Love Letters in the Future Tense
Dear S, How can I write to you on this damn system? There is no privacy; it breaks down; it's awful. I feel you fading away now...This is the G-rated...
Virtual Dance? --Get Real
It is difficult to look forward to the future of virtual dancing with optimism when dance and technology has already fallen into a rut. On the surface, things seem better...
I’ve Been very Promiscuous About Media: An Interview with Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas is a filmmaker and videographer whose works have ranged from music documentaries to erotic horror films. He is perhaps best known as one of the world's foremost dance...