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Session 6: Images and Spectacles
Chair: Erin Hill-Parks
Virtual Idols and Science Fiction: Cyberbodies and the Society of Spectacle
Giuliano Bettanin
University of Padua, Italy
In his La Société du Spectacle (1967)
Guy Debord explained the importance of images in contemporary society
and theorized that the spectacle, in its totality, is not an addition
to the real world, an ornament, but the heart of the unreality of the
real world. The advent of computer technologies and virtual reality
has further demonstrated the validity of Debord’s intuitions.
In this paper I shall analyze the concept of “virtual idol” as
representative of the society of spectacle and its exploitation in
science fiction and in cyberspace. Idol is the term Japanese generally
use to indicate music and movie stars, usually very young and with
a short career. Cyberpunk science fiction has developed this idea in
various ways, underscoring the connection between the concept of virtual
reality and the show business. Alice Sheldon’s short story “The
Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) is a precursor of cyberpunk and
tells about a girl who lives the life of a star through a remotely
controlled artificial body. It focuses on gender issues and on the
importance of one’s self-image. Instead, William Gibson’s “Winter
Market” (1986) deals with the birth of a music star who literally
becomes virtual as she transfers her own essence into cyberspace. Even
more interesting are Bruce Sterling’s novel The Artificial
Kid (1980) and Gibson’s Idoru (1996), both dealing
with the theme of media stars.
Also cinema and animation have investigated
the theme of virtual idols, as exemplified by Andrew Niccol’s
film S1m0ne (2002)
and by the Japanese science-fiction animated series Macross Plus (1994,
by Shôji Kawamori and Shinichirô Watanabe). Most significantly,
this phenomenon is a “reality” since when the virtual idol
called Kyoko Date was created in 1995. There are web-sites dedicated
to this “personage” on which one can find all the information,
interviews and pictures that are normally present in a “real” idol’s
site. This project further underscores the importance of Debord’s
concepts, since a virtual idol itself suggests that image and marketing
are the most important factors for both a media star and the society
that “produces” her/him and idealizes her/his role.
Escape by Hologram: Laurie Anderson’s Telepresent
Projection
Eu Jin Chua
School of Design,
Unitec, New Zealand
Entering a darkened room at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 1998, gallery-goers were disconcertingly confronted with the sight of a life-size figure of a seated man, an electronic ‘sculpture’ composed out of projected light. It was, as artist Laurie Anderson described it, a “fake hologram,” a live telecast image wrapped around a carefully moulded clay form to give the impression of three-dimensional presence. The title of the installation, Dal Vivo (Italian for ‘live’), played on the multiple meanings of the word – life-like, life-size, live. Also ‘life sentence.’ For what was most significant about the installation was that the image was that of an inmate at a high-security prison, convicted for murder and sentenced to remain there – for life. A camera picked up the image of the man sitting in his cell and transmitted it – in real time – to the exhibition space. The spectacle in the gallery must have been strange and uncanny indeed, a senseless human figure decorporealised into shimmering scanlines, yet incorporating all the real time twitches and fidgets resulting from the necessary hours of seated immobility. A “virtual escape” was how the prisoner understood his participation in the installation, yet the experience itself must have been far from liberating. To virtually escape he must sit more still than ever. To transgress the confines of his cell, he must remain even more securely restricted within the field of the disciplinary gaze of a surveillance camera. This unusual instance of the use of telepresence technologies is singular and extraordinary (and vastly different to other instances of so-called telepresence or telematic art) – but I am also tempted to read the prisoner’s condition as a general one. To have one’s behaviour and subjectivity so utterly at the mercy of a surveillant technological apparatus is perhaps an endemic condition, a state of tele-technological paranoia crystallized by, but not restricted to, the prisoner encased inside Anderson’s marvellous and uncanny ‘fake hologram.’
The Right to Bear Cameras: Thinking about
Weapons of Mass Humiliation in the Current US/UK-Iraq Conflict
Ann Kaloski-Naylor
Centre for Women’s Studies, University
of York, York, England
At this time (Spring 2004) I find it difficult not
to be haunted and disturbed by the now well-publicized snapshots taken
by some members of the US militia of their war experiences. While torture,
humiliation and documentation are embedded within military conflict,
it is the sense of casual self-affirmation (‘i’ ‘am’ ‘here’)
alongside images of contemporary horror that have shocked most of us.
This particular tourist gaze, circulated as record, intervention, memory
and trivia, is enabled for the first time by the widespread availability
of digital cameras, a medium that allows – via the net - fast
distribution and, to some extent, an avoidance of military censorship.
My
paper attempts to make sense of this particular relationship between
people and technology by bringing together current meanings of ‘cyber’ and ‘bodies’.
These terms - ‘cyber’, ‘bodies’ - are highly
visible as words in process, juggling meanings generated in many forums,
including technoscience, popular culture, informatics and life-narratives. ‘Cyber’ has
resonances of control as well as of ‘anything to do with the
internet’ and new technology in general, while ‘bodies’ makes
us think of flesh, sex, difference, and still binds us to discourses
of truth, reality and humanity. I suggest that the bodies of the US
personnel became irreducibly cyberbodies as they choreographed
bizarre photographic tableaux and smiled for their camera, a process
that was reinforced by their web site cloning, and I ask what part
humiliation plays in the production of these cyberbodies.
Clearly this
is work-in-progress about a war-in-progress, and my focus may have
shifted by August. However, my intention is to offer some specific
and located meanings of cyberbodies within an arena that is deliberately
awkward - politically, personally and academically, and as a UK citizen
with strong US affinities I seek to challenge my own cultural and technological
desires through exploring an extreme and now almost iconic example.