[Nettime-ro] Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology, Intensity, Heterogeneity

[artcontemporain@fido.ca]

  Book Launch in Prague, on Mars 2007

  A special issue of ?/Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology,  
Intensity, Heterogeneity/?, a European Journal (biannual) in  
philosophy and comparative studies, attempts to explore and assess  
aspects of the contemporary ferment in aesthetics.

  URL: http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/journals/current_issue.html[1]

  no. 32 Eds : Brian Rosebury & Louis Armand, Prague, Mars 2007

  ISSN  0862-8424

  This special issue contains the essay ?/Postdramatic Body: Human  
Body Dismemberment 2.1/? by FLORIAN LIBER, visual and new media artist  
based in Montreal. You can also see in /premiere vision/ digital  
images of synthesis presented by Liber in New York, on October 2006 at  
the time of the cyber dance performance of a projection installation  
in the middle of Lower Manhattan ([Re]Configurations: Arts,  
Humanities, and Technology in the Urban Environment).

  see URL: http://dezmembrare.skyblog.com/[2]

  INTRODUCTION

  ? FLORI(A)N LIBER similarly examines spatial conceptions of  
signification but in terms of the event status of the

  performative body as technological prosthesis. In Liber?s use of  
digital video, the performative body is not simply

  encoded, mapped, transposed and thus captured ? submitted to a form  
of technical memory that at once seizes

  and abolishes the performative event ? rather the body ?itself?  
becomes a zone of technicity. Consequently,

  Liber?s praxis tests the limits of an aesthetic theory of  
performance that rests upon the exclusion of any ?machinelike

  technicity.? The ?body? in this case is not the represented body  
(e.g. the figure of the dancer in Liber?s digital

  video ?performance,? /Human Body Dismemberment/), but the  
transcoded body, the body inscribed in and by a

  metamorphic algorithm (?le code plastique et gestuel?).46 It is a  
pro-grammatic apparatus, or what, in French,

  may be described as an /écriture au corps/: a body /of /writing and  
an /embodied /writing. And it is in accordance with a

  technics of writing, of inscription and circumscription, but  
equally of gesture, that Liber?s quasi-analytic

  ?dismemberment? brings into question what Derrida has termed the  
?inherited, ossified, simplified opposition

  between techn? and physis?47 ? that is to say, between technology  
and nature, the organic, the auto-mobile and

  self-sufficient.

  In turn, this questioning implies a further examination of the  
opposition between the whole and the fragment,

  the living body and the dead, already rendered ambivalent in  
Plato?s treatment of the body as /s?ma/. Echoing

  Artaud?s conception of a /corps sans organs /and Victor Tausk?s  
/machine à influencer/, Liber?s experiment in

  performative dismemberment deconstructs the human/non-human  
dichotomy and treats the ?body? as a

  discursive, informatic topology which does not point towards a  
?post-? human condition but rather to a

  ?prosthesis at the origin? of the human as such. In this way we are  
presented with what amounts to an attempt at

  an ?enactment? of a critique. Liber?s algorithmic dismemberments ?  
verging upon a type of quantum

  indeterminacy ? situate in place of the functional body a body of  
probabilities, according to which ?machinality

  (repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body)  
intervenes in a performative event,? as Derrida says, not

  however as ?an accidental, extrinsic, and parasitical element,? or  
?pathological mutilating,? but rather as the

  constitutive materiality of the body as /dynamic system/. And if  
?to think both the machine and the performative

  event together remains a monstrosity to come, an impossible event,?  
this is because it represents a violation of a

  logic bound up with a certain intentionality, for which the  
possible is always and only a function of the calculable.

  In pursuing the implications of an /in/calculability (at the very  
foundation of digital computing), Liber suggests

  that this impossible event is, as Derrida argues, ?therefore the  
only possible event.? Moreover, ?it would be an

  event that, this time, no longer happens without the machine.  
Rather, it would happen by the machine.?48

  Elegance of symmetry in the view that poses the intelligible  
against the merely sensible, and each against the

  /in/sensible, remains ? even in its most elaborate, ?technological?  
forms ? cognate with what Claude Lévi-Strauss

  described as analogical primitivism,49 and what John Ruskin in 1856  
termed the ?pathetic fallacy:? the ascription

  of human aspirations and beliefs to the otherwise inanimate.50 The  
philosophy of perception, and consequently

  aesthetics, has played a determinate role in fortifying this way of  
thinking, vested as it has often been in the

  intuitive, the unreflexive, and the metaphysical. Such traits have  
not only come to define a certain humanism, but

  also a logic according to which technicity remains the excluded  
other of the experiential realm. The paradox that

  this presents for aesthetics as a theory of art has not gone  
unnoticed, and yet the division between pure and

  applied art or between fine art and technics preserved itself into  
the twentieth century, according to which even

  the cinematic image has been subjected to a curious humanizing bias  
? most famously perhaps in Benjamin?s

  ?The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.?

  in TOWARDS A NEW AESTHETICS: TECHNOLOGY, INTENSITY, HETEROGENEITY

  a r t c o n t e m p o r a i n/ new technology arts

  MONTREAL, MMVII

Links:
------
[1] http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/journals/current_issue.html
[2] http://dezmembrare.skyblog.com/

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