Comments on week 3 readings

This week's readings were Stelarc's essay: "Towards the Post-Human: From Psycho-Body to Cyber-System" (1995) and the 6th chapter of Mark's book "Escape Velocity" named "Cyborging the Body Politic: obsolete Bodies & Post-Human Beings"
These two readings were, I found, a little disturbing. I have forced myself to open my mind up more and look at the subjects presented in class subjectively but I cannot. I find these people too weird. I see the body as a gift, and the way I was raised taught me that a gift is to never be returned. That's what I feel about these people, they don't like their body or don't care about it, and test it and/or find new ways to prove its obsoleteness. Stelarc thinks that the body is obsolete and focuses on the essence of the mind. He sees the body as "a waste of space" in our world today. I can understand that people have this feeling in them that tells them to keep looking forward and write the future, but this "writing" is just wrong. We know humans are not perfect, that we are weak and vulnerable to physical and emotional assaults, but what else do we know? we know that we DON'T know what we are doing on this planet but live, the ultimate challenge. Why replacing our lives and nature's gifts with man-made devices when you have the original ones that work perfectly? (I am referring here to his arm example) . to be stronger? to be faster? I feel this is all caused by the way our society functions today, we need to be the best all the time in every domain under every circumstances....but for what? whsat do you actually get at the end of all this but the small satisafction which needs to be repeated in order to continue. When you take life as it is, and learn the hard way, the way natures wants you to, this is when the mind elevates itself, when you have self-taught yourself something is when you reach a new level of spirituality, and this is when you can make your body obsolete. You will not need to satisfy a body need to fell better, your mind will overcome it ( in the limits of health preservation of course).

link: http://www.safemachines.com/implementationsFour.htm

Comments on week 2 Readings

Reflection on reading of week one:

-Jasmine Rault: “Orlan and the limits of materialization”
-Fakir Mussafar: “Body play: State of grace or sickness”

What I got from the readings, after being absent for the two first classes of the semester is that the body is used as a medium of expression to push the limits of acceptation. The body is rarely used as “voice” for artists, the body is something that we take for granted because it is us: we use our body to make art but never use our body as the art piece. In the first reading, we learn about an artist who calls herself Orlan. Orlan is a video artist who films herself being cut open by a surgeon in front of a small audience. She wants to dramatize the volatility of the human body. It is a practice so unusual that it inevitably makes an impact on its viewer. But apparently, Jasmine Rault, the author of the text, thinks she is doing nothing new , “she is simply exaggerating the process by which bodies materialize as knowable subjects”. Orlan says that she has always been about challenging and changing social norms. I say that she is certainly challenging them but is not changing them at all. This type of art is too extreme and self centered: I see it as a partial suicide, you do something completely crazy hoping people will watch you and give you attention. People don’t learn by being grossed out, they learn when you let them do the thinking, not when you show them images of how intense you can get and how little self respect for nature’s gift you have.

The art of Fakir Mussafar is different. When I was reading his text, I felt like it was more of a personal thing then a show-off. He evens explains it to us how it took him a while before finding peers who were in the same mind frame as him. I don’t think that he first meant it as an art form, people can see his interventions and classify them as art if they wish, but everything he does is something done to learn more about himself. And people understood that, and wanted to learn about themselves the way he did. That’s why he takes it seriously, he and now his pupils worry about their pupils and make sure everything is well done and well thought before. Orlan worries about the sex difference in the surgeon cutting her up because she might be left cute…..

link: http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/mental_health/cutting.html