| WALTER BENIAMIN AND MODERNIST TECHNO-PERFORMANCE
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
(1936)
1. 'One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of
a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every
art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to
effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical
standard ... in a new art form. The extravagances of art which thus
appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise
from the nucleus of its richest energies. In recent years, such barbarisms
were abundant in Dadaism... Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial
- and literary - means- the effects which the public today seeks in
the film.'
2. 'Aura ... vanishes' ... 'The film actor ... feels ... exiled not
only from the stage but also from himself ... he feels inexplicable
emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived
of reality, life, voice ... The projector will play with his shadow
before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the
camera.'
3. 'Aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The
aura which on stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for
the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the
shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public.
Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it
the aura of the figure he portrays.'
JEAN BAUDRILLARD AND THE POSTMODERN TECHNO-BODY
Jean Baudrillard, 'Metamorphoses, Metaphors, Metastases' (1987)
1. 'Mechanical machines ... were still machines with alterity, an other,
whereas ... at this point one wonders where the real world is ... This
kind of artificial world, much more performative than ever before, completely
automatized, is also ... an exclusion of man, of the real world, of
all referentiality.'
2. 'The body of metamorphosis ... a non-individual body without desire,
yet capable of all metamorphoses- a body freed from the mirror of itself,
yet given over to all seduction'.
3. 'Pure' metamorphosis deteriorates into a'metaphoric' register whenever
'a symbolic order appears' and 'the body becomes ... a metaphoric scene
of the sexual reality'... 'the scene of a single scenario, the unconscious
sexual phantasmatic'.
4. 'After the bodies of metamorphosis and metaphor follows the body
of metastasis'. A 'deprivation of meaning and territory' ... 'no more
soul, no more metaphor of the body.'
5. Our best strategy is to observe how 'the handicapped ... precede
us on the path towards mutation and dehumanization'.
Jean Baudrillard, Car l'illusion ne s'oppose pas a la realite...(1998)
6. By generating a 'magic and dangerous reality', according to 'a principle
of condensation diametrically opposed to the principal of dilution and
dispersion informing all our images today... photography has refound
the aura that it lost with cinema'.
7. 'It's the immobility of an instant in time behind which one always
detects a sense of movement, but only a sense of it ... This is the
kind of immobility that things dream about, this is the kind of immobility
that we dream about.'
PAUL VIRILIO AND THE POSTMODERN TECHNO-BODY
Paul Virilio. Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1998)
1. 'Jacob met his God in the person of an angel and he wrestled with
this angel for a whole night and at the end of the night he said to
the angel, 'Bless me, because I have fought all night.' What does this
symbolize? It means that Jacob did not want to sleep before God. ...
He wanted to remain a man before God. ... he fought rather than just
sleeping as though he was before an idol. Technology places us in the
same situation. We have to fight against it rather than sleeping before
it.'
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (1995)
2. 'Radiotechnologies ... will shortly turn on their heads not only
... our territorial body, but most importantly, the nature of the individual
and their animal body".
3. 'The super-equipped able-bodied person' becomes 'almost the exact
equivalent of the motorized and wired disabled person.'
4. The 'catastrophic figure' of the 'citizen-terminal ... based on the
pathological model of the "spastic" wired to control his/her
domestic environment without having physically to stir.'
Paul Virilio, Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1996)
5. 'I hope that my remarks ... haven't led to any kind of misunderstanding.
My research is not at all opposed to technology or technological performance.
... Unfortunately, 1 realize that many people claim that I am apocalyptic,
negative, pessimistic. But all of that is out of date.'
FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI AND THE FUTURIST TECHNO-BODY
Marinetti, 'Tactilism' Manifesto (1924)
1. To'educate my tactile sense' and discover 'newways to educate the
handicapped' ... To wear gloves for several days, during which time
the brain will force the condensation into your hands of a desire for
different tactile sensations.'
2. Sudan-Paris, an 'abstract suggestive tactile table', a 'still-embryonic
tactile art' ... 'In its Sudan part this table has spongy material,
sandpaper, wool, pig's bristle, and wire bristle. (Crude, greasy, rough,
sharp, burning tactile values, that evoke African visions in the niind
of the toucher.) ... In the Paris part, the table has silk, watered
silk, velvet, and large and small feather. (Soft, very delicate, warm
and cool at once, artificial, civilized.)'
Marinetti, 'Futurist Synthetic Theater' Manifesto (1915)
3. 'All the electromechanical inventions that alone will permit us to
realize our most free conceptions on the stage.'
Marinetti, 'La Radia' (1933) Manifesto
4. 'A pure organism of radio sensations', allowing the 'amplification
and transfiguration' of both 'the vibrations emitted by living beings'
and 'the vibrations emitted by matter.'
HENRI CHOPIN AND THE POSTMODERN TECHNO-BODY
Dick Higgins. 'TheGolemin the Text' (1992)
1. 'The poet uses complex vocal and non-figurative sounds, edited at
several levels -electronically manipulating and broadcasting them at
top volume - and adding to them in live performance with voice and microphone
... Despite his diminutive height, Henri Chopin radiates such an intensity
that he seems to grow to a gigantic scale, the gravity of his expression
suggesting some kind of vampire or evil spirit. The process by which
this spirit emerges on stage can be really terrifying. ... Because the
real process of the work is non-mimetic, deriving from what the artist
- in this case Chopin - is actually doing ... the emergence of this
spirit is inherent in the live performance of the work.'
Henri Chopin. Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1998)
2. 'With the Christian tradition the body was absolutely nothing ,„
I remember that between 1948 and 1949 I studied theology in a seminary,
and was furious when people said, 'Only, Christ, Christ'. For me it
was absolutely impossible, because the human body is very important.
Without the body it is impossible to produce the spirit.'
Henri Chopin. Interview with Lawrence Kucharz, Larry Wendt and Ellen
Zweig (1978)
3. 'I started in '55 with sound ... the diction with my voice was very
bad ... but I listened to my voice on a tape recorder ... and my voice
is very good... the timbre is very good too ... so 1 put my Finger between
the head and the tape on the tape recorder ... and ... the sound was
different! Distortion! After that I changed with my finger the speed
of the tape on a very simple tape recorder and again the speed was different.'
Henri Chopin. ABC Television Interview, Australia (1992)
4. 'When I put the microphone into the mouth I have simultaneously five
sounds: the air and the liquid in the mouth, the respiration in the
nose, the air between each tooth and the respiration in the lungs ...
In 1974 I put into my stomach a very small microphone and it was a discovery
- the body is always like a factory! It never stops - there's no silence!'
Henri Chopin, 'Open Letter to Aphonic Musicians' (1967)
5. 'Sound poetry, made for and by the tape-recorder', composed of 'Vocal
micro-particles rather than the Word as we know it, more easily codified
by machines and electricity ... than by any means proper to writing'
Henri Chopin, Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg (1992)
6. 'We still haven't discovered are the ways in which this language
will evolve. This is firstly because technology is evolving so rapidly,
and secondly, because whereas computers only have forty or so phonemes,
we know that we possess thousands of sonic values. We know that the
ear not only receives sounds, but also gives out sounds.'
7. 'All these discoveries were completely unknown when I began working
with sound poetry - I was starting from very basic literary ideas. It's
thanks to the new technologies that I've discovered all these new values.
In the same way, future technologies will reveal the multiplicity of
our auditory and visual cells - the eye, the ear and all our other senses.
So while we cannot predict the future, it's certain that new departures
have already been made, and that we cannot live without them.'
|
