Monday, April 20, 2009

Techno Fashion....





[what's up with those guys in the background, they share this opacity!]
What is the body of the future? Is it a visual form that we build towards, or is it an idea that forms the image?  Who's imagination determines the future body? What is it based on, what does it reference? 
According to the text, Twenty First Century Bodies, a revolution is taking place between the body and its material extensions, clothing in this case.   Once it was fashion that made a predominantly female audience surveillant of their own body forms, however, the artists and designers discussed in the text approach the fashion field with methods and ideas that begin to re-explore the relationships between body and clothing, giving the body's terrain authority over the evolution of what fashion can be.
When we discuss fashion, we can talk about it as if it were any casual material extention with a daily function, to protect, to disguise, to beautify, to criticize.  Fashion also bridges over to the ritual world, and then, becomes costume, which can also characterized by daily function.  Fashion is special, and normal.
Hussein Chalayman's work featured above, brings two casually functioning objects into the area of the body.  A table, and a skirt.  Individually, the two daily objects maintain their own separate relationships to the human being, as they function differently, the human body accesses these functional entities in different ways. By allowing two creations to exist as one on the human body, Chalayman gives a consolidation the ways in which humans interact in a space between themselves and their extentions.  If a woman decides to sit down at a table, she can simply take off her table skirt and set up.  Moreover, she can do it anywhere.  The table is no longer separate from the body.  It becomes part of the body; a detachable, occupying space as a human part, and then as its own as it is removed.  
Occupying space as multi-faceted objects, reconstructioning the relationship between the body and what lays outside of it...what else is the future body?  I recall the spacial and functional relations to a woman's being to begin before the 21st century.    For example, nomadic cultures are mobile, therefore, their casual objects must be as well.  Women carried babies in backpacks.  Perhaps Chalayman's table-skirt is not a new evolution of the relationship between body, object, and space, but rather a critical perspective of older ideas in the 21st century lens.  Although, his specialty is a nuance, because a skirt can also be a table, where a backpack functions as a mother's hold, it remains a backpack.  And still, with the function and space consolidated, what is the future body? Where are its current limits? 

Monday, April 13, 2009

Man and Art Figure


An interesting conception of the human body as a construction in a space with a diversity of possibilities for creative outputs, as confirmed by Schlemmer, explaining his figures, "These are the possibilities of Man as a Dancer, transformed through costume and moving in space" (28).  In "Man and Art Figure", the physical possibility of the body as a creative engine and as a living sensor in space and time is put into scientific and philosophical abstraction, giving creativity itself, an environment surrounded by rules.  Later in the work, the writer explores the possibility of the body in relation to technological advancements and how these communions give progress to art form in the post-modern age, yet, how they also corner the artist by three abstractions, "He may seek realization within the confines of the given situation...Or he may seek realization under conditions of the greatest possible freedom...Or he may isolate himself altogether from the existing theater".  It seems that these abstractions continue to shadow the artists of today, only, the platforms of these abstractions have become crossed, a designer also works as and artist, working with or without rules at the same time give the creative individual the "greatest possible freedom". 
This is the tragedy that continues to haunt the modern artist.  For instance, the failure of a metaphysical body, to be the object, or to be free of these rules themselves remain the challenge of both science and art. 
However, the second abstraction exploring the "greatest possible freedom" is the most successful out of the three. The geometrics of body and space presented by Schlemmer begin to confirm that man begins with his body and ends with it, he is the measure.  The first base of geometry realizes the point, which is imaginary. Going on to build lines and planes and volume, the world rests on a base of dematerialization, leaving a possibility for another conception of the body wide open.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

NEURO SENSO

Assuming that "I" is the current intrastructure of sensory organs and all other functioning or non-functioning organs, all working and converting information to stimulus into feeling, then feeling into emotions, but not exclusively in this order, who then, is the "I" if the current intrastructure of functional or non-functional organs is re-arranged or absent?
It is correct in this sense, to view the human body and its parts as prosthetics; this concept objectifies the "identity" of the parts of the human body and this leniency makes re-arrangement possible.  The conceptualizing of body parts does not end.  In the text, "On the Subject of Neural and Sensory Protheses", Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb write, "We propose, however, that prosthetics exist in a continuum with orthotic and surgical hardware and software that are designed to facilitate nerve function, sensory function, and motor ability" (126).  In deconstructing the aware sense of the body and focusing on the variability of nerve function and developement, the materiality of the physical body is invariable.  Does that reconstruction make a new consciousness? 
The cultural variability of body awareness confirms that sensory and feeling are conceived differently among different cultures.  In asian cultures, for example, chi is the flow of life energy, comparably, electricity.  Inflammation is a disturbance in the balance of the energy flow.  Accupuncture, aims to reconstruct the inflamed region of the body, and the distantly effected areas.  In this sense, the goal of the chi kung, is to use the body's current intrastructure to consciously manipulate the chi flow to better oneself, ideally, another type of recruiting of body parts.
The question still remains.  Who is "I" in the midst of the body? Where is identity found within the body's extent? And excitingly, how is identity found in "machine" prostheses; where is the threshold between human and cyborg? [I think this was Norbert Wiener's interest]
I would like to bring forward a threshold that is difficult to collapse, but one in which I find to often presuppose the feelings of the body in a reality, and that is language.
Cartwright and Goldfarb examine the discernment of sensory stimuli into meaning, frequenting its subjectivity with the term "intrasubjectivity".  When does the consciousness confirm what its body senses, as a determined feeling?  When is red, red? When is red, love, anger, stop? When does "I" look great in red? When the network of language develops to categorize perception, the variability of perception is reduced, in theory, the congruent variability of nerves is reduced psychologically. Say, a humble individual cannot determine that he sees red, he responds grey to a sample of grey and a sample of red.  Logically, the individual would be determined as colorblind. Fibromyalgia Syndrome is the name of the malady, which is found to be rooted in brain damage or nerve damage of the eye; some are born with it, some develope it.  In the realm of science, diagnosis seems simple. However, what is one reality over another?


Great books, relative ideas: The Order of Things, Michel Foucault; Remarks on Color, Ludwig Wittgenstein.



VISUAL POST: youtube live puffer fish sushi.  while it is quite a psychologically nauseating tradition to me, it is a great an example of consciousness being parsed into some state, approximate to death, as the sushi chef cuts down the body of the fish (unfortunately, one of my preferred animals) organ by organ, its living function is reduced, and while still "alive" they are all separated from each other. what does it feel like?

WORDS ARE SPACE as waves and molecules

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

INTERACTIVE COSTUME PROGRESS

 silver mylar+ alcohol+cotton ball+gloves = opacity and transparency embodied in one divine material!   THANKS COLLEEN!

Monday, March 30, 2009

Japanese

An interesting correlation arises between Japanese sensibilities of art, and the theory of Literalist art explored and destested by Michael Fried in his text "Objecthood and Reductivity".  In his work, he describes certain ideas on which the work of minimalist artist Donald Judd  concentrates his work, explaining that Judd is concerned with the "whole" of the work, in a sense, the purity of a work, disconnected from references, and interrelationships that manifest within the work, perhaps out of the artists' control.  Fried later establishes in his text, that Literalist art sensibilities attempt to bring the work back to the realm of life, that its own trajectory is only whole and complete when it blends back into some kind of "normative" level.  For example, minimalist sculpture is not simply about the body of the artwork, it is interactive with the space in which it is presented, giving itself a stage and therefore drawing in themes of theater and performance instead of being a purified form lost in any time and place.  
The gravity between a work of art and its place in life or in human reality is where I believe the Japanese condition explored by Kusahara's text begins.  
In the beginning of her work, Kusahara  explains aesthetic value in Japan as being well incorporated into the living realm, meaning functionality, spacial, and not excluding adoration, which is conditioned by the person in the state of adoration.  This means that aesthetic value in Japanese culture is not independant of the viewer.  It is influenced by the viewer, and "aesthetic truth" has more variability, it changes as its viewing environment changes, as language changes, as its function changes.  The development of Japanese aesthetic value is "indirect", and this is confirmed in the text when Kusahara writes:
It is obvious that drinking a cup of green tea is not the final goal of the ceremony.
Tools that are fully functional and yet aesthetically beautiful are appreciated, while
they represent the taste or even personality of the owner.  Naturally, a playfulness
of elements is regarded favorably.  For example, tea bowls with an unexpected
design or choice of material are highly appreciated, if they function well (286)
Within this indirection of aesthetic value, this certain Japanese condition explores all of the interrelations of a work of art, or a body of artistic value, for what is it itself, and what it is in a condition of change.  Japanese art and Literalist art come together as they explore a view and complete it, and this inherently brings it back to life. 
So how does this interaction between artwork and wholeness contribute to Japan's interest in technology, and contemporary art-making? What does "kawaii" (superflat, non-depth in post-modern age) have to do with it?

THINGS FROM THE OTHERSIDE BROUGHT INTO THEIRS
The scientific, constructive condition imported from the west has been successfully adopted into the Japanese way (not to mention that certain aspects of the "whole" are already evident in systems of Western thinking, like Tautology).  
What is popularly conceived as "Japanese" is much more than "charming" or "repulsive".  I am simply going to state that the over-exaggeration of imagery in Japanese pop culture is an observation and is then demonstrated as an extension from Japanese culture to Western culture.  Anime characters are not simply Japanese imagery, they are more or less exaggerated forms of the interpretation of Westerners with a Japanese flair, similar and more playful to exaggerated images of race in the US, such as "Black face" or the flock of little yellow "Chinamen".   Of course, japanese animation has also been turned into an obsession, like many pop culture epics, such as Star Wars.  (more coming)

A Sample of Japan's Complex Visual and Electronic Culture



[this place is real, by the way]







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