Digital Kultur

Krop & Sex

I dag

• Link to identitet (representation, RL-VL)

• Krop (teori) from cyberdistance to the return of the body

• Link to Sex as interesting ”meeting point”

Link to identitet

Representation: text, images… not bodies

Imaginary identity

Play with identity

Performance & self-staging

Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators

Tracy Spaight & Robbie Cooper

2007

Representation: VL vs RL

from dualism body-mind

• Plato (duality of body and mind / mind trapped in the body / access to the superior realm of ideas hindred by the body and its earthly needs)

• Descartes (privilege of the mind: I think, therefore I am / both exists independently from each other)

• Science has fought this (even though it secures ”material” independence, but it has survived in the arts…

The soul is immortal

to the embarrasments of the body…

Apollo Dionysus

sun earth

ego id

psyche eros

stoic Epicurean

mind heart

reason emotion

thinking feeling

order chaos

restraint excess

male female

hierarchy equality

science art

system spontaneity

compulsiveness impulsiveness

city country

classicism romanticism

civilization nature

…to the dissappearance of the body

Gibson´s Neuromancer: jacking in, leaving the meat behind

VR

AI

Sci-Fi

Immortality dreams persist

Stelarc Ping Body, 1996

Exoskeleton, 1998

Immortality dreams persist

• ”picture a ´brain in a vat´, sustained by life-support machinery, connected by wonderful electronic links to a series of artificial rent-a-bodies in remote locations, and to simulated bodies in virtual realities” (Moravec, 1998: 92)

• ”our minds were evolved to store the skills and memories of a stone-age life, not the enormous complexity that has developed in the last 10.000 years. The portion of absolutely essential human activity that takes place outside of human bodies and minds has been steadily increasing. Hard-working intelligent machines may complete this trend.” (Moravec, 1999: 116)

But we cannot leave our meat…

• ”even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies” (Stone)

• ”while an individual may successfully pretend to be a different gender or age on the Internet, she or he will always have to return to the embodied reality of the empty stomach, stiff neck, aching hands, sore back and gritty eyes caused by many hours in front of a computer terminal” (Lupton)

and bodies are not just biology…

Also embodiments of the self:

”the body, therefore, with all its organs, attributes, functions, states and senses, is not so much a biological given as a social creation of immense complexity, and almost limitless variability, richness and power” (Synnot 1993):

Think of issues such as dieting, exercising, surgery, fashion, gender change operations…

Alternative: the posthuman”This vision is a potent antidote to the view that parses virtuality as a division between an inert body that is left behind and a disembodied subjectivity that inhabits a virtual realm, the construction of virtuality performed by Case in William Gibson´s Neuromancer when he delights in the ´bodiless exultation of cyberspace´and fears, above all, dropping back into the ´meat´of the body. By contrast, in the posthuman model, human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand. In this model, it is not a question of leaving the meat behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis”

(Hayles, 1999: 290)

Interesting posthuman-questions

• What are the effects of embodied presence online?

• How does the relation real bodies – virtual bodies (in text or image) work?

Taylor: avatars as embodied presence

• ”Through avatars, users embody themselves and make real their engagement with a virtual world. (...) Avatars, in fact, come to provide access points in the creation of identity and social life. The bodies people use in these spaces provide a means to live digitally – to fully inhabit the world. It is not simply that users exist as just “mind”, but instead construct their identities through avatars.”

• “Users do not simply roam through the space as “mind”, but find themselves grounded in the practice of the body, and thus in the world.”

Taylor: avatarsThis grounding of presence not only consists of embodied practice, but of embodied social practice

practice of presence as a social activity

the inscription of self on the space becomes a socially-mediated experience. Through action, communication, and being in relation to others, users come to find themselves “there”. It is through placing one’s avatar in the social setting, having a self mirrored, as well as mirroring back, that one’s presence becomes grounded [4, 5]. As one user put it, “Avatar bodiesdon’t exist in isolation. They exist in context”.

The “symbolic significance” that digital objects carry with them lend themselves to real relationships, interactions, and values. Certainly we must include avatars, or digital body objects, in this category

Taylor: avatars

Link to sex

• The practice of sex in internet spaces is a common aspect of embodiment online (Taylor)

• Sex practice (be it textual or image based) brings into play a lot of the questions about the body, embodiment, and the relationship between real and virtual bodies.

give us a break!

Tekst-guides

Til næste uge

• lÆS– Haraway, Donna. 1991. "Cyborg Manifesto:

Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century".

– Schaap, Frank. 2006. "Dissagregation, Technology and Masculinity".

– O´Riordan, Kate. 2006. "Gender, Technology, and Visual Cyberculture: Virtually Women".

• Praktisk: udforsk videre i Second Life med jeres avatarer. Læg mærk til hvordan masculinitet eller feminitet er representerede af de forskellige avatarer. Er køn overhovedet vigtigt i det interaktion i SL?

Bibliography GIBSON, W. (1984). Neuromancer. London: Grafton. HAYLES, N.K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: virtual

bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LUPTON, Deborah. (1995) “The Embodied Computer/User”. In ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (eds). Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk. London: SAGE Publications.

MORAVEC, H. (1998). “The senses have no future”. In Beckham (ed.). The Virtual Dimension: architecture, representation and crash culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

MORAVEC, H. (1999). “The universal robot”. In Druckrey (ed). Ars Electronica: Facing the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

STONE, A.R. (1995). The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

SYNNOTT, A. (1993). The Body Social: symbolism, self and society. London: Routledge.

TAYLOR, T.L. (2002) "Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds" in R. Schroeder (ed.), The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. London: Springer-Verlag.