Sunday morning thoughts...

I rarely say anything complimentary about Catholicism and like many of my generation I spent my childhood in fear of eternal punishment for even the most menial sins. Perhaps Catholic children no longer live in fear - I wouldn't know, because I rejected all forms of religion or religious belief at the age of thirteen and haven't formally attended mass or anything equivalent to it since. I do however occasionally visit St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Francis Church (both Catholic) and St. Pauls Cathedral (Anglican) purely for the stunning architecture and glorious light that emanates through the stain-glass windows. Their lofty ceilings, spacious interiors and absolute quiet do give you a sense of peaceful serenity.

The one positive aspect I am left with from my catholic upbringing is the aura that surrounds Blessed Mary MacKillop, the catholic nun who, along with Father Woods began 'The Sisters of St. Joseph'. I was first introduced to the work and ideas of Blessed Mary MacKillop when I was one of a dozen girls chosen to attend the newly opened Mount St. Joseph Girls College in Altona West in 1964. As a Josephite college the students were encouraged to follow the example of the Blessed Mary MacKillop, who was a rebel and a saint. Even now, the school's website declares that they encourage their students to practice 'moral courage, responsibility and self discipline'. But it was Mary's utter defiance and insistence upon equality, rather than hierarchical organisations that appealed to me.

Mary MacKillop was born in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy in 1842. When she was 24 she took a vow of poverty and donned a simple brown habit. She worked tirelessly for marginalised groups (the poor, the homeless or the abused) by setting up schools and orphanages. Because her work did not fall under the control of the local Bishops she was excommunicated for so-called insubordination only three years after she began her order. Pope Leo XIII finally approved the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1888, 22 years after it was initiated.

As I sit here writing this, I realise that I might have been a different person if I'd stayed at that school. But as it turned out my mother who had been absent in my life for eight years, suddenly appeared and I left the school and went to live with her. Instead of religion and the rather conservative home life that I spent with my grandmother, I was exposed to my mother's friends who were musicians, artists, writers, prostitutes, alcoholics and atheists. Instead of order, security and routine, there was disorder, insecurity and unpredictability.

Overview of artists from Art + Science Now

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/links/gen.art.res.present/currentslide%20show/slide_show_summary.html

I appreciate Paddy Harltley's ' Shortcuts to beauty: Face corset 16 2004' and Kira O'Reilly's 'Wet Cups 2000' under Body Systems.

The Flood

Part of the report in The Argus newspaper of the drowing of two of my father's sisters at Elwood Beach on 1 December, 1935. From microfiche entry at the State Library of Victoria.

I've posted this here because it gives you some idea of the kind of material that I'm covering in my novel called The Flood. Although I have to say that it was not this particular event that inspired the writing, its just one of the stories of my childhood. I was reared by my maternal grandmother and when I started swimming she was terribly afraid that my sister and I would drown as our Aunties did. She was totally convinced that history repeats itself. She was partly right, for my younger sister nearly drowned in a swimmng pool and I was persuaded not to jump in to try and save her. At that time we were almost extactly the same ages as our Aunties were when they drowned.

No, the thing that inspired the initial writing was the flood that occurred on Australia Day, the 26 January, 1963 after a freak hailstorm in Melbourne. We lived in Altona, which was greatly affected because the water contained in Kororoit Creek broke its banks and made its way south flooding most of the city. Water (beaches, rivers and the flow of water) as well as drowning or the fear of drowing, figures heavily in the novel as a record of real events, but also as a metaphor of life itself.

Ron Mueck exhibition...

Old Woman in Bed (2000): Ron Mueck. Photograph: Julie Clarke, 2010

I saw the Ron Mueck exhibition at NGV International today. Although I was astounded by his hyper-realistic sculptures, which actually reminded me of the exquisite mastery of another Australian sculptor, Sam Jinks, I was most affected by Mueck's Old Woman in Bed (2000). Her tiny fragile body, perhaps no larger than a new born babe lies on its side in what can only be perceived as foetal position. Her fragile existence is obvious, her eyes are partly opened and her mouth gapes as if this is her final breath. There's just a hint of wetness in her nostrils, indicating that she is alive, but barely so.

It's easy to forget that these sculptures are are made from Silicone rubber, polyester resin, cotton, polyurethane foam, polyester and oil paint, and the whole time I was looking at her I just wanted to reach out and hold her close to my chest and somehow comfort her in what appeared to be her last moments. The young girl standing next to me at the exhibition appeared distressed and when I cried - for I could no longer hold my face like I was unaffected, she cried with me. I knew that the whole time I was looking I was thinking of the last time that I saw my grandmother in hospital before she died. She had lost a lot of weight and was about a third of her size, tiny, fragile and in pain, but still concerned that the child in the next room was crying and needed help.

There's definitely a sinister and grotesque quality to the pieces in this exhibition. An extremely over-sized newborn baby has blood on its skin and its umbilical chord still attached, two old women who stand close together, appear to be plotting the downfall of another who they watch with disdain, a small, naked man in a boat looks out with an extremely cynical look on his face, a giant of a man, also naked, leers at us as we look at the blemishes on his body. A disembodied head depicts a strange smile from a man who appears recently decapitated.

I really enjoyed this exhibition, it plays with scale and confronts us with life and death. It reveals the human side of human nature that we generally don't see, and Mueck has captured all the nuances displayed on the face and on the subjects bodies.

Image as prompt...Barbara and Santa Barbara

Two women sitting in Bourke Street, Melbourne yesterday: Photo Julie Clarke 2010.

So, what do you think of my strange obsession with words and images? Yesterday I'm sitting as one does in the Bourke Street Mall and a woman sits down and almost perfectly mirrors the blond-haired woman sitting on the seat next to her. On the edge of her sleeve was the word 'Barbara'. How interesting I thought, perhaps a new designer? But no, when she shifted position I noticed that the words read from left to right upwards from her sleeve to her shoulder and it said 'Santa Barbara'. Was she from California, or just wearing the t/shirt. Then I remembered that the one thing that really annoyed me about Barbara Creed's book: Darwin's Screens, Evolution Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema is that in discussing the role that women played in Hollywood musicals during the 1930s, that is, as metaphor of the fecundity of nature, she omitted the fact that many women in Hollywood musicals had blond hair and blue eyes and were blatant representations of the eugenic Aryan ideal, promoted by Hitler and the Third Reich. So, whilst she stresses the influence on Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories on Hollywood film-makers, particularly Darwin's 'natural selection' and 'sexual reproduction', and points out how the dance sequences are in fact demonstrations of the 'mating ritual', she makes no mention that Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was inspired by Darwin's On the Origin of the Species... and created the term 'eugenics' (from the Greek word meaning 'well-born') in 1883 and promoted a purer, improved species through selective breeding. It's a well-known fact that 60,000 people were sterilized in America through eugenic social policies, designed to purify the race of minority identities (Jews, Gypies, Blacks and Indians), mostly dark haired and dark skinned. Indeed, America - actually California, was the epi-centre of eugenic activity.

ABC interview with Karen Casey + artists + Global Mind Project

Fantastic interview with Karen Casey and artists who performed 'Spectacle of the Mind' at the launch of the Global Mind Project at Federation Square on Friday 15 January 2010. Contains actual footage from the live performances by Jill Orr, Stelarc and Domenico de Clario.

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s2799320.htm

It will all end in stars: A tribute to Cassandra Laing

Every couple of weeks or so I eat my lunch in the lounge in the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne. I do this, not because of the comfortable couches but because on the wall, just above the old fire-place is a pastel drawing by Cassandra Laing who died in September, 2007 after a two year battle with breast cancer. She was only 39 years old and her artwork was only just beginning to receive critical acclaim and prominence.

I met Cassie when we were both undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1990. I remember Cassie as the student whose large-scale, complex and intriguing charcoal drawings took up much of the wall of her studio space. I later knew her as a friend I could call upon to assist in reading drafts of my ARC proposals as she worked in the Research office at Melbourne University. I often saw her on campus and we would talk about art, her PhD (which she didn't complete) and the fact that her sister had died of breast cancer two years before. The last time we spoke, she'd just got off her bike and was removing her helmet. Last images will always remain. I remember thinking as I saw her pale skin face and half-smile, that something wasn't right. When I asked, she looked down at the ground and simply said 'I hope I'm OK'. She smiled and we chatted about other things, such as the fact that she was happy that she was spending much of her time drawing.

Every time I look at this drawing I see something different - although the sphere constantly absorbs me. Is it an alien space-craft that has drawn the children to its side? It is the metal ball, that Dr. Ellie Arroway(Jodi Foster) travels in to the Vega star system? Is it a cell with DNA marker, rendering her and other family members susceptible to cancer?

Yesterday, as I sat and looked at the children, whose images, might have been, but are not reflected in the shinny surface of the orb, I remembered one particular summer when I was a child. Heat haze of a Wangeratta sky, the long grass, the constant shrill sound of cicadas that filled the air, my sisters and I wearing freshly pressed tee-shirts and shorts, waiting restlessly for the sun to go down so that we could go to the drive-in theatre. The slow drive back home in the cool air and leaning my head outside the car window so that I could look up at the stars.

Although this drawing could be inspired or copied from a photograph of Cassandra as a child playing with her friends, I prefer to think of it as pure fantasy. Cassie liked the science-fiction film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) and for her last exhibition - It will all end in stars, she had a solitary snapshot of Jodi Foster pinned to her studio wall. I think this drawing describes (as it does in the film Contact) a physical, emotional and spiritual journey and it will continue to inspire me as Cassie did.

An awkward toy? Stelarc's Third Hand

I was doing a search on 'Google Books' yesterday for something on Stelarc's work that I hadn't read (and I'm sure that there is an abundance of material). It was primarily because I had been sent an email from an overseas student doing a PhD on Stelarc, who enquired whether she could ask me questions about his work from time to time.

I came across Petra Kuppers book The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. She mentions Stelarc's works several times, but concentrates primarily on his prosthetic third hand (she makes the mistake that many do, by calling it a third arm) and his 1993 performance Stomach Sculpture. I found it intriguing that of all the things she might have said, she made the following statements:

The hand goes where it will, touching what it wants, groping, inelegant, an awkward toy. Stelarc bring this hand into class-room workshops as well and lets others play, and inevitably genitalia are touched, inadvertently or not, mates grin at one another, and slightly forced as well as open audience laughter characterized every time that I have seen him perform, teach, or lecture (Kuppers p.117)

And further on:

Stelarc's carnival laugh makes possible the risque nature of many of his third arm presentations and the grotesque balletic movements that might be uncomfortable if they weren't funny - all this play with body extensions and with taboo zones (Kuppers p.117).

I decided to look again at my Masters thesis (Transhuman Aesthetics: Performance Artists and Cyberculture, 1997), because it was there that my first impressions of Stelarc's Third Hand were written. I quote:
The third hand, developed in 1975 prior to his first suspension event, is a transparent attachment to Stelarc's right arm. It is a machine composed of two distinct parts: the arm , which contains the mechanics to operate the hand and the hand itself, which has Grasp/Pinch, Wrist Rotation, Release and Tactile Feedback functions. The third hand is the double and phantom of both the left arm in involuntary movement and the right arm to which the prosthesis is attached. It replaces neither but serves as a bridge between the human and the cybernetic. It makes a division, but invites connections between the hand of the person who creates (teckne) and the tool created (technology). The Third Hand is a mechanism exposed, and although the boundary between exterior and interior appears thin and impenetrable, its perspex casing is the transparent skin that protects the mechanism allowing easy access for the eye to view the components. The machine has been humanised to a certain extent - it has touch-sensitive finger pads. The Third Hand closes around an object (or other hand) gently, but firmly. The gesture/action mirrors a human hand that grasps for survival - food gathering, tool usage, intimacy. The prosthesis does not augment Stelarc's body, because he has no biological need for a third hand. It is a conceptual and aesthetic attachment which allows Stelarc to raise questions about technology and the human. The prosthesis is a bridge, an idea, and so the third hand as imagined dismemberment is the path to memory. As augmentation it is a link between human and machine. As recently as 1990, Helen Thomson said of Stelarc's performance at La Mama; that he makes his body a technological construct alien to our notions of nature, and yet medical prosthetics have been used by amputees for the past 30 years. Whilst there has been no amputation, Stelarc's re-membering and addendum to his body, silences the arm to which it is attached. The Third Hand although originally covered with a skin-like synthetic substance, is always left uncovered. The boundary between the interior and exterior has been removed allowing easy penetration. As Didier Anzieu as said: 'Since the Renaissance, Western thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core or nuclei'. (The Skin Ego, Translated Chris Turner, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989, p.9 ). Stelarc creates through this third hand construction, a vehicle for rendering everything as pure surface. What is revealed in the looking at this mechanism is machine components instead of human bone and viscera; and the third hand, with very minimal reflex action does not in fact mirror the human hand in motion. The casing is an aesthetic element and protection for the machine components. It is a prototype. In contrast to the human body, the prosthetic third hand, although elegant and sophisticated is an inferior simulacrum, a sculptural element. Its seductive nature is in its apparent transparency which invites contemplation. (Julie Clarke, 2007)

I find it fascinating, given Petra Kuppers is a disability activist that she didn't make more of Stelarc's prosthetic Third Hand and the significant influence it may have had on perceptions of those with prosthetic limbs - cyberbodies as sexy bodies - cyber chic - look at the press given to model, athlete, actress, double amputee Aimee Mullins. Film theorist and amputee Vivien Sobchack (1995:213) cautions against the sexiness of the cyborg identity, instead, stressing the vulnerability of flesh, and rightly so, for there are about a quarter of a million amputees worldwide who experience poverty, discrimination, pain and trauma because of the loss of a limb. I'm certainly not saying that Stelarc's intention was to draw attention to the plight of those with amputated limbs, but much of his project is about how we are augmented or improved by medical and communications technologies.

A thought on ageing

I know why old people have that certain look on their face. It is a knowing look, a resignation. They sit on a park bench or city seat with a look on their face that reflects faces of people they've known in the past, like all the expressions have taken up residence in the fine cracks on their skin and in the look in their eyes.

They watch young people dart pass, gleefully unaware that the people who they love right now, people they loathe right now and others in their lives, whether they like it or not, are going to return to them as flashes of memory. Ghosts, like the pungent odour of garlic on the breath or onion on your fingers, continue to exert their power and presence.

I am not quite that old. The kind of old that makes you totally resigned to your fate and the things around you. An oldness that makes you walk so slowly that those watching wonder whether you are really going anywhere, except down to the shops with your carry bag in one hand and your purse in another and then back home again with a litre of milk and a fresh new loaf of bread that will last for days, because you live alone. The bread will only be half-eaten because mold will form on the crusts and you won't cut it off and eat the salvaged bread, even to save money. Milk is quite heavy to carry when you are old!

I'm talking here about an oldness that has crept into your bones and your muscles, that tells you, you are no longer strong; fierce wind can easily move you so much so, that you have to hold onto a pole to stop from falling. An oldness that makes you vulnerable to heat and cold, a state of being that makes you look suspiciously at younger, energetic people, who eat fast food and who are always loud and excited, on the move, talking endlessly on their mobile phones. An oldness that makes you move your body quickly sideways (and that's not easy) to avoid small children in the tram who swing their legs around wildly and who threaten with each move to kick your delicate, delicate shins.

I am old enough that ghosts - memories of the past are beginning to invade my thoughts and things in my home. I can tell because they constantly assert themselves. I am here. You can almost hear them saying it. There they are, all the ghosts of the past. I'll sit with that for a moment.

Yes, ghosts are not only people from the past, for their faces are no longer distinct; ghosts are the feelings that surround events, the minutia of life, the dust that always settles on the sideboard even though you dusted two days ago, the fact that your fingernails grow so quickly, but you never notice until they are suddenly long. So, ageing is about time and the way if flows or escapes you!

When did my nails grow long again, didn’t I spend time the other night cutting and filing them and thinking that I might paint them with bright red nail polish? Well - perhaps not red, but something pink and unobtrusive that tells the world I am sensible and middle-aged. As if the two somehow go together.

‘I see that you are wearing your nails, natural?’ says the young female sales assistant in the city centre. 'I have a nail buffer that will make them shine brilliantly’. You know that this is about her making a sale of some new product. Of course it will work, but she doesn't know that I'm not an easy target for her 'sweet to the customers' smile. I held out my hand and she shines one nail until it looks out of place amongst all the others, which now seem so terribly dull and lack luster.

Virtual activity under-rated?

After telling artist friends who visited me last night what I've been doing, one said '...but what are you going to do this year that's creative'. I'm sorry, I thought that writing, taking photographs and contributing to a blog in which I write exhibition/performance/installation reviews and other philosophical thoughts - often in a poetic way, WAS being creative. I didn't realise that activity in virtual space was so under-rated!

JILL ORR - Performance review *Spectacle of the Mind*

Jill Orr: 'Spectacle of the Mind" performance, Federation Square, Melbourne. Photograph: Brecon Walsh (2010)

Prior to Jill Orr's performance for Spectacle of the Mind, two men, dressed in top hats and tails, walked slowly, each dipped their hand into the bucket of water they were carrying, sipped from their hand, whispered unintelligible words and threw small droplets into the air and onto seated audience members.

Orr, in long black dress and veil that partially covered her EEG headset, emerged on stage from inside a vertical box initially covered by a black fabric screen. I was immediately taken back to the 1920s silent film 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' (Robert Wiene) because Orr in her trance-like state, arms outstretched and body swaying, appeared as combination of Dr Caligari (who had a traveling show with his beautiful sleep-walker) and the somnambulist Cesare - both insane, both holding power over an audience, who were stunned by her revelations.

After emerging from the trunk (vessel, cabinet) Orr took a large white handkerchief, spat into it and passed it to one of the two men accompanying her on stage. I understood this gesture to be part of a narrative that centered upon bodily fluids and connected with the previous gestures of the two men who circulated through the crowd, sprinkling the vital fluid of life.

Whilst Orr moved her body and arms in what might be perceived as demonic behavior, suggesting perhaps that SHE was under a spell; one of the two men (one fully dressed, the other naked except for a pair of white trousers) also appeared mesmerized. Was she exerting some power over them and their actions? One man's body, bereft of any energy was physically supported by the other, who wiped the sweat from his body and brow and then placed the handkerchief into the vertical box. All the while, Orr's brainwaves were creating swirling, circular images on the screen, suggestive of cells, vortexes or holes.

Orr's performance, which consisted of a series of bodily movements, all theatrical - evocative of the magician or the mesmerist (at one stage there was even smoke from a smoke machine), built to a crescendo in which the fully clothed man, slashed the throat of the one he had been holding throughout the performance and smeared blood over the man's naked chest . This violent act was accompanied by blood red images over Orr's projected on-screen image.

It may have been because I had recently re-seen the Nick Cave (writer), John Hillcoat (director) 2005 film 'The Proposition' that the notion of justice and injustice, murder and bloody violence entered my thoughts. It may have simply been the power of one person over another, the minimal stage props or Orr's 19th century clothing, which evoked for me that whole era of magic shows and the apparent power that mesmerists had over the minds of others.

There were obvious black/white references in this performance which speaks of science and magic, power and resistance. Was this Orr's way of referring indirectly to 'our' past and current relationship with indigenous Australians. Federation Square, where the performance was held and Birrarung Marr(the Yarra River) is built on the land of the original owners the Wurundjeri people.

Whatever was in Orr's mind, this was an enthralling performance, mostly ambiguous and thoroughly enjoying.

Donna Haraway + Modest_Witness@Second....

Brecon Walsh photographs of Stelarc, 'Spectacle of the Mind' performance

Stelarc 'Spectacle of the Mind' performance for Global Mind Project Launch at Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia, 15 January, 2010. Photograph: Brecon Walsh (copyright, 2010). Reproduced with kind permission of the artist.

This on-screen multi-image produced by the interaction between Stelarc's brain-waves, Karen Casey images and Stelarc's own Prosthetic Head is reminiscent of Surrealist art. Generally associated with unusual juxtapositions, strangeness of composition, the depiction of chance events, an engagement with the other or depictions of the unseen world of the unconscious, this somewhat surreal image appears somehow appropriate in a performance that attempted to depict the spectacle of mind.

The manifold faces, distorted as they were by brain-wave activity hint at the schizophrenic nature of identity mediated by technological interface. The self is simultaneously self as non-self - self as other, split between real and virtual body image.

The picture produced is fascinating (and I must admit I'm happy that Brecon managed to capture it because it eluded me) for, as Stelarc conducted a series of screeching sounds into the performance space by moving his right hand slowly up and down, he also appears in this particular screen-grab, to be orchestrating his own self image in the myriad of occurring overlays.

Text removed from catalogue essay

Due to page and space restrictions, the following quotes and text was edited from the original essay that I wrote for the 'Spectacle of the Mind' catalogue. I include it here for your information.

__________________________

We’re just very, very complicated, evolved machines made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we are conscious (Daniel Dennett) 1.

I used the word ‘soul’ because, out of all the various words that one might use —‘consciousness’, ‘intentionality’, ‘mind’, and so forth — it is the one that I think most evocatively suggests the deep mystery of first-person existence that any philosophically inclined person must wonder about many times
during their life…(Douglas Hofstadter) 2.

Although Hunt (1995) maintains there is no neurophysiologic research which conclusively shows that the higher levels of mind (intuition, insight, creativity, imagination, understanding, thought, reasoning, intent, decision, knowing, will, spirit, or soul) are located in brain tissue, EEG’s have been associated with particular states of consciousness. Consequently, clinical applications of EEG feedback have elicited various responses in popular culture particularly science fiction films, such as Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956), Prisoner television series (1967), Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973), The flight of the Navigator (Randal Kleiser, 1986), The Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and Torchwood television series (2008), just to name a few. As a symbol of scientific progress, the inclusion of an EEG device within the film’s narrative established a connection between the opposing themes of science and fantasy, personal control and lack of it.

However, far from being controlling, EEGs have therapeutic applications. They are used to provide biofeedback to individuals to enable them to alter blood pressure levels, relax their muscles or reduce chronic pain, revealing that we have a certain amount of conscious volition over those seemingly ‘hard-wired’ bodily functions. Through specialised computer brain interface, many individuals are able to recover lost bodily functions after disease or accident. Understanding brain neuroplasticity enables us to apply positive or cognitive behavioural thinking to modify our behaviour and greatly improve our lives.

____________________________________
1. Daniel C. Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained, Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, p.431-432.

2. Douglas Hofstadter in: An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter by Tal Cohen and Yardin Nir-Buchbinder, Haayal Hakore, September, 2007, reproduced on line at http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

SPECTACLE OF THE MIND - CATALOGUE ESSAY

Jill Orr: Photograph by Malcolm Cross (2010)

SPECTACLE OF THE MIND

Mind body dualism has been hotly debated since seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes’ suggested the human body was a machine controlled by a mind or spirit and ‘…the soul is of a nature wholly independent of the body’. Although Cartesian dualism maintained mind is a non-physical substance separate from the body, modern philosophers believe mind emerges from the brain but is not divergent and mind states will eventually be explained by physiological conditions.

Friedrich Nietzsche maintained ‘there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, acting, becoming’, in other words we cannot separate mind from body, thought from action. The pre-eminent philosopher Daniel C. Dennett concurs, for he ‘…identifies conscious experiences with information-bearing events in the brain…’ and the ‘self’ rather than a ‘ghost in the machine’ is a convenient word deployed to create a boundary between our body and the world. For Professor of Cognitive Science, Douglas Hofstadter ‘Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind…’ a strange loop that folds back on itself in reflection and paradox.

However, even as we hold onto the notion of self as an amalgamation of our individual thoughts, experiences and memories, the brain’s plasticity – like computer ‘software’, enables it to change and adapt through new experiences responding to stimuli to form new neural pathways, thus modifying and transforming self. Indeed the concept of self, as distinctly different from another, may be perceived as being continuously eroded by our interconnectedness to other minds with our on-line electronic communications.

In our culture of ubiquitous technology, uber-realistic virtual images generated on micro and macro screens - mobile phone, IPod, television and computer, we forget the unseen world of radio waves, magnetic fields and brain-waves that surround and permeate our existence. It is these invisible energies that allow us to communicate, share information and connect to each other in previously unforeseen ways. Undeniably, the hidden world of human cognition and self (albeit imaginary or hallucinatory) are visually depicted as avatars in virtual sites such as Second Life, Active Worlds and Cybertown. These avatars, a projection of the embodiment of the computer user, resurrect the notion that the human body is inhabited by a concealed force, a soul or spirit that can be brought forth, constructed, embellished and extended in virtual space.

Karen Casey’s Global Mind Project continues a tradition begun in the eighteenth century with ‘phantasmagoria’ and ‘magic lanterns’, Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon (a multi-media, early attempt at virtual reality) and Jaquet-Droz’s Spectacle Mecanique (three doll automata representing an illustrator, writer and musician). By collaborating with artists Jill Orr, Stelarc and Domenico de Clario, who will perform unique creative interactions and connectivity with state of the art neuro-headsets and purposely designed video effects software, Casey draws us into the realm of science fantasy and neuroscience, as well as real world applications of EEG technology, extending to her three invited artists her work and opportunity for them to engage in a dynamic that will ultimately be an amalgamation of minds. Drawn together in a coalescence of self and technology, the artists connected to the EEG headsets are presented as both automata - self-operating machines and intentional, self-activating beings, that have the ability to affect and be affected by the on-screen imagery generated.

Casey’s interest in the mind stems from a deep desire to understand the unseen forces that affect our very being. Rather than being concerned with the notion of mind as individualized - residing in the body or brain of a subject, she alludes to an energy field that is multi-dimensional and holographic, permeating reality at a quantum level. As such, she neither adheres to the Cartesian model of mind/body dualism, nor to the notion of consciousness, cognition and memory solely residing in or emanating from the human body. Rather than being merely a unique storage system in which information is processed, the brain functions as both receiver and transmitter in a field of intensity that saturates reality. Consciousness, as animating force, passes through physical and non-physical bodies as an affecting, generating oscillation, and although the mind may be perceived as carrier, its magnitude and direction extend beyond the limits of our perception. Casey’s Global Mind Project seeks to reveal how mind extension, enabled by technology, floods the receptive field and generates an inter-textual dialogue of fluidity, continuity and reciprocity that unites us all and displaces the boundary between artists and audience, mind and world.

Creating connections between self and other, audience and machine, Jill Orr continues the practice of using her body as a vector for provocative imagery, raising questions as to how the body is written in the technological terrain. This body, as in the work of Casey, is delicately connected to land and space, substance and immateriality, and is fluid and multiple in its various manifestations. By secreting herself in a trunk, hidden but communicative through the EEG interface, she engages with the notion of the Cartesian disembodied mind, one that is provided with sensory information from a vast computer matrix. Her performance evokes telepathy - transference of ideas between time and space performed by ‘mentalists’, or the illusion created by Harry Houdini a century ago in his Metamorphosis performance, where he was handcuffed and locked into a large trunk from which he escaped. In Orr’s performance the trunk is a veil or mask, which conceals body as self, whilst simultaneously revealing self as mind extended through technology and audience observation. In the narrative that informs her performance Orr charts an imaginary journey that begins eons ago to a more recent past in which a trunk, a traveler’s chest, floating upon a vast ocean, is remnant of gift and journey, host and place. This sarcophagus, a lone body on the open sea, is splintered by immense electrical energy, releasing one single water molecule that infiltrates and permeates other life forms on a voyage that traverses various manifestations of liquid, solid and gas. As an essential element of life, water imagery reveals connectivity between all living things and is a metaphor of essential spirit, spark or consciousness.

Initiating a link between spirituality and technology, by entering a trance-like or sublime state of being whilst wearing the EEG headset, Domenico de Clario will blindfold his eyes, limiting his ability to see or be distracted by the exterior visible world - simultaneously facilitating and opening a portal to the invisible and inaudible world within him, that will be manifest in sounds and screen visuals as he elicits notes from a piano keyboard through pure thought or brain-wave transference. These aural resonances - singular and unique, will echo into the universe leaving imperceptible and fragile traces. Utilizing Buddhist meditation, breath and concentration techniques to alter his brain-wave events, de Clario’s performance, inhabits the magical realm between the dark void of night and phosphorescence of day, evoking the complex, shadowy space of unseen human consciousness. His work resonates strongly with Casey’s, which opens up fields of intensity between the timeless and boundless quality of inner space and the temporal, restrictive aspects of the now.

Stelarc’s observation of his own screen phantom, which lacks qualia and conscious experience, morphs here into self projected as a being, becoming, affecting, in an animated dance of diverse facial contours and expressions. The divided screen represents the split-body evident in some of Stelarc’s earlier performances and reveals an encounter between actual and virtual, voluntary and involuntary, physical and non-physical states, image and self. Since the Prosthetic Head mirrors its human counterpart in looks, speech and facial expressions, it highlights how identity and language become fragmented, transformed, dispersed, multiple, hybrid and distorted in communications culture. Stelarc’s performance raises the very question of where mind and consciousness are located, since there is proximity and distance between his actual body and the on-screen image. Mind, perceived to be located in one body is actually dispersed into the (albeit virtual) body of another, echoing numerous encounters and interactions that we have over the Internet. Given that the Prosthetic Head has no brain but verifies evidence of mind through language, expression and behavior, we are left wondering how this reflects mind and self, since the self encountered is a mask or screen on which identity is projected.

In all, the boundary between the artists’ body and its images, the seen and unseen, the actor and actant are challenged, providing opportunities for each to evolve into something else through synchronous resonances. Through both the human body and its technological counterpart, the project provides a nexus between magic, which made no distinctions between living and non-living things, and contemporary science and technology, which more often than not challenges and erodes that binary and brings us new experiences of the body and its projections. The live screen media at Federation Square, generated from the brainwaves of these artists as they perform and manipulate Casey’s imagery, return us to the extensive eighteenth century Shows of London which ‘brought the classes together...’ but were also ‘the scene of the perennial conflict between the claims of amusement and those of earnest instruction’ – and indeed one of the central concerns of the Global Mind Project is to reveal the transient and transformative aspects of the nature of mind.

Julie Clarke 2009 ©

Dr Julie Clarke is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. She has published extensively in Australia and internationally.

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Daniel C. Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained, Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, p.459.
René Descartes (1641). Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.Douglas Hofstadter (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, New York: Basic Books.
Friederich Nietzsche (1887). On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic.
EEG – electroencephalograph records electrical activity from the subject’s brain through electrodes attached to their scalp.
Richard D. Altick (1978). The Shows of London, Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard Press, p. 3.

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Global Mind Project:
http://www.globalmindproject.com/

Live stream of 'Spectacle of the Mind' performances by Jill Orr, Stelarc and Domenico de Clario with Karen Casey images at Federation Square, Friday, 15 January, 2010 from 8.30pm to 12.10 am 16 January.

mms://live.fedsq.hyperlink.net.au/eventsfeed/

STEVEN MIDDLETON - Prototype micro-robot

Prototype micro-robot (still from animation): Steven Middleton 2009.

Prototype micro-robot (still from animation): Steven Middleton, 2009

In Kevin Kelly's book: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994) he describes an experimental capsule in which he is nurtured and protected by a complex amalgamation of the 'living and the manufactured'. He concludes: 'The realm of the born - - all that is nature -- and the realm of the made -- all that is humanly constructed -- are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered' (p.2). This allusion to vivisystems - (from L. vivus: alive), a melding of mechanical and natural systems is evoked in Steven Middleton's new design for a micro-robot that will be used in performance by Stelarc when it is eventually built.

Middleton's micro, six-legged autonomous insectoid robot, complete with jointed, movable tail is a hybrid scorpion/spider, without the deadly mandibles. Even so, it carries within its design a sense of both fear and wonder (we may be stung with the scorpion's tail), horror and disgust (insects rise from dead or decaying matter, which they invade), the abject and the 'clean and proper body' (Kristeva) (the ambiguity of the thing that violates borders, threatens our sense of order and disorder). In literature the insect is most definitely linked with pollution and leaky boundaries, indeed in Franz Kafka's short story 'Metamorphosis' the main protagonist gradually turns into what he considers to be a disgusting insect in which his humanity (whatever that is) was compromised.

The insect is decidedly other to the human, it's whole body is an exoskeleton. But for the human, technology itself has become an exoskeleton in that it provides a metaphorical armouring or illusion that it will render us better, more viable, more human?

The very fact that the robot is small enough to enter the body through one of its orifices (and here on the tongue it is dangerously close to the human throat) is threat enough! Since the tongue is a vital instrument in human speech and communication, a physical link is created between the robot's body and language and is metaphoric of the various bots that crawl the web. As search engines, these bots strip away code, search websites, interpret information and ultimately help us in our reactions with online communication. Like insects that scurry around in the night these little aids crawl the web without us being aware of them. They are in fact, out of control. According to Kevin Kelly 'The marvel of the 'hive mind' is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members' (p.16)

Middleton's image of the close proximity of the robot to an intimate part of the human body, suggests that we (as a species) may have to learn to accommodate other species in order to survive (communications technology being vital to productivity, social networking, information sharing). This recognition, alliance and incorporation of other species into the human is already evident in biomedical procedures in which the human body is enhanced by xenotransplants, creating a hybrid - human/not human (porcine derived products are used in replacing human body parts). The scale of the robot also alludes to a futurist notion of the design of nano-scale, nano- robots that will be introduced into the human body for targeted drug delivery, virus search or disease monitoring. For the moment at least, nano-robots are still in the research and development phase.

When I look at the image of the robot on the human tongue, the movement of the robot (in the animation) and the apparent passivity of the human I am reminded again of Donna Haraway's pronouncement in 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181: 'Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert'.

Steven Middleton's work may be found at:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~stevem/

Elaine Miles *Reflections 2009*

Jean Miles: Reflection (2009) - Photograph: Julie Clarke, 2010

Elaine Miles - Performance installation, Atrium, Federation Square. Photo: Julie Clarke (2010)

We've all seen them, in antique or opportunity shops or displayed in Gran's cupboards. Already possessed and taking pride of place or awaiting possession, these delicate objects, as precious as any jewel are like Pyrite, they look like gold, but our eyes fool us in our looking.

I'm talking about the myriad of gold, amber, brown and yellow, cut glass or smooth glassware, goblets, cups, glasses, bowls, plates, all kinds of trinkets, a worn out honey-colored Teddy bear, hanging tinsel, a gold painted vacuum cleaner, a quilt (made by her mother), goldenrod lampshades, stacks and stacks of glistening beads, fabric with decorative yellow edge and other glass and copper ornaments that form part of an installation entitled 'Reflections (2009) by the Melbourne artist Dr Elaine Miles, currently on display in the Atrium at Federation Square, Melbourne.

Elaine Miles artwork 'draws upon and re-considers interactions with domestic environments and quotidian objects' (catalogue). When I happened upon the artist, her mother and a friend who were quietly finishing off a number of woollen toys within the installation space this afternoon I was taken back to my own childhood, the pleasures of sitting, talking and making; the comfort of holding a toy made for you by loving hands.

This rather minimal performance occurred without fuss and bother - after all, they were doing what families do, or did, in times long past. It evoked for me the women who worked side by side in the film "How to make an American Quilt' (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1995). Watching Elaine interact with the women who were part of the woven fabric of her life, the intimacy and knowing looks, I remembered my own grandmother, the basket that had permanent residency next to her lounge-chair, the three colors of wool (brown, grey and black, ) used by her to darn holes in our socks. Her Singer sewing machine and the folds of fabric that fell around it as she worked. The brown-Betty - too small for more than two good cups of tea and the amber set of glasses - a wedding present, all those years ago, protected inside the deep brown wooden side-board. But there was other glass, not all brown - green and clear and just as fragile and the fake gold leaf frame around an image of a golden nymph. Gold is on our fingers it is in our psyche, forever something to be desired.

The highly reflective surfaces of the fragile glass in Elaine's installation, evoked a sense of enlightenment or revelation, the spiritual link between family and objects. How their presence ultimately evokes a sense of memory, re-collection, reanimation of that, which will remain forever absent. But, there was nothing negative or depressing about these things that suggested another time and place, a gentler era, one that might only be visited by bringing such a unique collection together.

Languid

Soft, languid heat hung like a thick blanket over a suburban window.

White sky glare is the color ground of urban landscape

and I wait, as others do,

for the sound of rain.

Until then,

sounds of traffic on Bolte Bridge

it's miles away but its transient occupants exert an influence

a constant hum, which flows and surges like some giant machine that never sleeps

and, I remember now my half sleep, awake and wakening again to noises that I can't identify.

What now? Attempt sleep or remain alert in this half-state?

The warm breeze quietens the birds,

where do they go to avoid the heat?

The creme Housing Commission flats - the most significant scenery from my kitchen window

has one yellow rectangle amist windows three across and two red rectangles, five and twelve down,

painted on the outside.

It is, as if a giant Mondrian painting was hanging gently in front of

patches of white cloud and slivers of blue sky.

VISUAL POETRY AND MAIL ART

Incantation. Julie Clarke, 2006

Untitled #8. Julie Clarke, 2006.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\Blog reviews\Visual poetry.pdf

PEARLS

Calcium carbonate protopearl - Reproduced with kind permission from Rachel Armstrong, 2010

I was thinking about the autopsy report on Henrietta Lacks (described in Rebecca Skloot's book 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks') and the grayish white tumors - like pearls that had grown in clusters throughout Henrietta's body. It was appropriate that the surgeon described the tumors as pearls, since pearls are formed by the intrusion of a parasite or organic matter into animal tissue. The animal (usually a mollusk) then begins a defense action, covering the intruding material with a secretion to protect the animal body. Cells from Henrietta's cancerous tumors were 'cultured' to create immortal cell lines for medical research. Pearls are 'cultured' by the intentional insertion of a foreign object into the tissue of an oyster or mollusk.

I wanted to make something out of this potent imagery which so vehemently proclaimed the existence of white substance within Henrietta's African American body. Whilst thinking about this I happened upon an photograph by Rachel Armstrong (above). It may have represented an eclipse floating languidly over Earth's terrain, a bright white light at the end of a dark tunnel, black holes, white holes and wormholes, a close-up of a fish eye or a cell and its nucleus, but was in fact a calcium carbonate proto-pearl she was growing in a laboratory. So, I had an image, but it still can't explain the impact that autopsy report had on me. I suppose that what I wanted to convey is how all those little white pearls had colonized her body and how it was her pain, grief and death that helped many people throughout the world. Information on Rachel Armstrong:

http://www.rachelarmstrong.me/

Short review of Rebecca Skloot's book 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'

There’s a short paragraph about three-quarter way through Rebecca Skloot’s book ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’, Crown Publishers, New York, 2009 that describes the autopsy carried out on Lacks's body after she died of cervical cancer in 1951. The description exemplifies the division between black and white within the Lacks family (there was a line of African American Lacks and Caucasian Lacks) and the segregation that occurred between the ‘white patients’ and the ‘colored ward’ at the John Hopkins Medical Centre where Lacks was treated for her disease.

The dead woman’s arms had been pulled up and back so that the pathologist could get at her chest…the body had been split down the middle and opened wide…grayish white tumor globules…filled the corpse. It looked as if the inside of the body was studded with pearls. Strings of them ran over the surfaces of the liver, diaphragm, intestine, appendix, rectum, and heart (p.212)
The writer of this autopsy report made it more poetic than scientific and appears to appreciate the preciousness of the immortal cancer cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks and utilized in many experiments over the past five decades or so to develop polio vaccine, and are continually used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping and other scientific research. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

HeLa are immortal cancer cells in that they will continue to live indefinitely if correctly nurtured. However, because they proliferate quickly in tissue culture they often contaminate other cell cultures. Indeed, ‘due to their ability to replicate indefinitely and their non-human number of chromosomes (HeLa have 84 rather than 46 chromosome)’the evolutionary biologist, Leigh M. Van Valen argued in 1991 that HeLa is the contemporary creation of a new species. I find this a little disturbing because for a long time African American’s were classified as other, sub-human or not human and his focus upon ‘contamination’ just fuels notions of the non-human infiltrating and taking over the human, almost always perceived as ‘white’.

Indeed, Skloot underscores in her book how many African Americans were used in experiments often without their consent or knowledge of the possible detrimental outcomes to their health or well-being, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment between 1932 and 1972, which recruited 339 impoverished people with syphilis, who were not treated with penicillin which could have cured their disease. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Skloot outlines the experience of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who lived in fear of being experimented upon in John Hopkins Medical Centre. Deborah’s fears grew out of urban myths associated with the medical centre as well as verifiable facts that attest to a history of medical experimentation on African Americans, inmates, women and children by various organizations, including Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners during WW2. See:

http://mrgreenbiz.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/vaccines-and-medical-experiments-on-children-minorities-woman-and-inmates-1845-2007/

Many may not be aware that many Australian children (Indigenous and non-indigenous) placed in orphanages between the years of 1945 – 1970 were used in medical experiments that involved vaccines. It was only late last year that an apology was given to what is now being called ‘The Forgotten Australians’ by the Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd and following that, an apology by Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne for the part that the University played in experiments on children, who were considered unworthy when removed from uneducated or poor parents considered by authorities as unfit.

As the Senate inquiry into the Forgotten Australians recorded in 2004, in the years after this War children were repeatedly struck down by outbreaks of polio, influenza, whooping cough and other diseases. Many died or were left disabled. In response, medical research institutions including the University of Melbourne worked urgently to develop vaccines. The report states: These vaccines needed trialing and children in orphanages were used as the ‘subjects’ for a range of speculated reasons, including that they were often the most susceptible to disease as an epidemic could sweep through an orphanage. 1
Exploitation of minority groups, the poor, the criminally insane often shows up in other ways, such as the illegal trade in human organs. In the affluent Western world we are encouraged by the rhetoric of technological humanism to believe that medicine and technology will improve our health and extend our lives. However, although medical technology enables organ transplantation there is a distinct lack of donated organs to cater for the worldwide demand. This has lead to a monetary value ascribed to, and a black-market trade in human organs (heart, kidney, liver, corneas), growing numbers of human organ brokers, and the potential for exploitation of the poor who can gain financially if they sell their bodily fluids (blood, sperm, ovum), tissue or organs. Nancy Scheper-Hughes explains:

In general, the flow of organs follows the modern routes of capital: from South to North, from Third to First World, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male.2.
Indeed as Skloot points out the Lacks family has not benefited at all financially from the sale of Henrietta’s immortal cell line, even though they have been and are essential to a multi-billion dollar biomedical industry.

One single thing that comes through in this book (and this becomes evident in the various interviews Skloot undertook with Lacks family members) and that is, the marked contrast between the billions of dollars made by pharmaceutical and other biomedical companies through the use of HeLa and the abject poverty that the Lacks family experienced and continue to experience. Not only have they not benefited from the sale of their mother’s cancer cells, but they cannot afford health insurance or education. I personally find it abhorrent that some people have to consider selling a body part in order to survive. I am saddened by the fact that Deborah had so little in order to remember her mother– a bible, her mother’s medical record, a photo; and that Henrietta gave so much to the world. I sincerely hope that Skloot’s book will pave the way for the world not only recognizing, but applauding Henrietta Lacks’s legacy. If nothing else, Rebecca Skloot’s book will remind us that thousands of women every year die from cervical cancer and that many are alive today because of early screening and detection tests.

Rebecca assures me that she has:

…set up a Henrietta Lacks Foundation scholarship fund, which I'll help start with some of the proceeds from my book. Anyone will be able to donate to it. My hope with the scholarship fund is that it will provide money to help descendants of Henrietta Lacks.I write about the scholarship fund in the book, and there will be information on the book jacket about how to donate once it’s online. 3
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1. Glyn Davis, Vice-chancellor, The University of Melbourne 18 November 2009.
2. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. (2000) ‘The Global Traffic in Human Organs’, Current Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 2, April 2000m q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4102-0004, p.6.
3. Response to a facebook question that I asked Rebecca on Sunday, 27 December, 2009.

an.other..voice... (Homage to Beckett), Julie Clarke © 2006

Before this…a strange remembering…or perhaps…not a remembering…something someone said…distant and clear…but yet… still in the head…like it was a remembering…or a voice…but, not that made sound…something…else…a flash of something…clear and distant…no capturing it…a bird with wings too fast…a flash of light…and then gone…caught…in the corner of the eye…but…gone…yes, a memory…on a screen…that…was not in the brain…or perhaps in the brain…no way to make sense of it…just there…and yet…not there at all…frayed…edges…the scarf that hung near the window…moved in the wind…a flash of something…light…and then…gone…think of something…something…other…than…that…the scarf in the wind…small shadows on the wall…half light…lying sick in bed…noise outside…but still in the head…like a remembering…of some…other sound…distant yet clear…and all the time…thinking that it must have been…something…to name…the fresh…green, blades of grass…plucked and gathered in the hand…and her…not here…long gone…but only just remembered in the blades of grass…and the small voice…clear and distant…a remembering and yet not…just caught in the corner…a bird in a web…flickering…then still…flickering…the edge of the scarf…then gone…think of something other than…in the dark…no sound…save the remembering…of…something said…distant and clear…a voice…but no capturing it…the bird in a web…face in the mirror…think of something…other than…in the dark…caught in the corner of the eye…and her…long gone…already…in the ground… the green…grass…and her…she was told not to mention her name…not that name…to name…her mother…she…not told until long after…did not know how to feel…a flash…too fast…and then…when she did feel…a long time after…no pain and loss…already…in the ground…the grass in the air…and then gone…like a remembering…lying sick in bed…the brain continues…frayed…edges…noise…outside…and then without noticing…a change…a flash of something…the face clear and distant…the voice continues…then…all clear…the distant siren…she did not know…could not know…the all clear…as if it was remembered…she…standing….or was it lying…no matter now…as the…all clear…distant…but…still in the head…sounded…in the dark…but no capturing it…found…herself…wandering…around…still waiting…must have been something…to name…face in the mirror…found…herself…still…listening…to…something other than that strange remembering…a voice…but…no sound…and then…the all clear siren sounds…she, standing or sitting…no matter now…standing or lying…noise…outside…but still…in the head…think of something else…other than dark…caught…in…the…corner of…and she…no matter…a flash too fast and then suddenly…a flickering…then still…something…caught…in the remembering…no sound…the brain…continues…gradually…realizes…the something to name…she on the floor…the voice…distant and clear…a bird in a web…and then…gone…suddenly…a shower curtain…the voices…distant and clear…a flash of something…an arm around her…and her with her eyes closed…could not have known it then…a remembering…no way to capture it…sitting back against the cold wall…the shower curtain…always winter…for some strange reason…she…could not have known…the loud voices…the arm…the alarm…and then…the, all clear…and…never…before…then…the ticking…distant…and clear…sounded…in…the dark…no capturing it…the brain…continues…suddenly out of nowhere…a…silence…the all clear siren fades…and she…never before mentioned…already in the ground…the blades…of…and her…sharp…and…aware…in the remembering…which was not a remembering…but something else.

FACEBOOK 'FAN' PAGE

I've just set up a Facebook 'Fan' page. It's a cross-promotional exercise to try to get more people to read this blog and to gauge how/which people are actually reached through this kind of Internet communication. I am hoping that I gain more fans other than just my Facebook friends. I'll now have three arenas in which to post my thoughts, although this blog will contain the most extensive and developed ideas.

AVATAR

If you want pure immersion without having to think too much, then AVATAR is the film for you. The narrative alludes to other sci-fi action films such as, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Minority Report and Alien (1 -4). The CGI - 3D computer graphics is absolutely amazing, probably the best that your going to see for a while. In fact, I think I spent most of the film just luxuriating in the fact that what I was seeing was so life-like - at one point I tried to touch a rather beautiful and fragile form that was floating just feet away from me. Occasionally throughout the film bits of debris would float above your head or a person in one of the scenes appeared just in front of you. I couldn't resist removing the 3D glasses just to see what the film looked like without them. The colors were more vivid and the whole film looked a lot clearer without the glasses, except that the 3D areas appeared slightly blurred. It's best to watch the film in 3D as intended!


Avatar comes at a moment in which we are just getting used to the idea of virtual avatars in arenas such as Second Life, but here in this film an avatar is a genetically engineered real body operated by implanted human consciousness. Why are avatars necessary? Basically human beings have destroyed their own planet and having located the planet Pandora, which contains a valuable mineral, they decide to infiltrate the Na'vi tribe who occupy it so that it can be plundered for all it's worth. The Na'vi, with mostly human morphology, have blue bodies, are extremely tall and athletic, have large ears, a tail and feline faces. Their weapons of choice are knives and bows and arrows and they live in harmony with an immense tree deity that has a root system that provides an inter-connectivity to all things. When the Na'vi were using their bows and arrows I kept thinking of all the films I'd seen as a child with the U.S. cavalry attacking Native American Indians, who were depicted as savages, but who had complex and significant belief systems, rituals and sacred places.

The avatar sent to infiltrate the tribe, learn their language and cultural system is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who has lost the use of his legs in an accident. Becoming an avatar enables him the illusion of being able-bodied, albeit for the short time of his avatar experience. Indeed, Jake, who must lie prone in a pod, can move around the planet with his avatar body.

The avatar body is in fact a slave body, constructed purely for human use and as such may be read in relation to those other bodies throughout human history that have been used for our own desire. Old fears about genetically engineered cloned bodies, constructed purely for the use of those who may need organ transplants resurfaces in this film in which bodies are important purely for their use value. But there is more to this because Jake, as outsider (dis-abled) - as less than worthy (in many people's eyes) is, like those other less than worthy Na'vi, considered dispensable (collatoral damage) in the white man's desire to perpetuate his own future needs.

The most significant aspect of this film is that Earth, or what counts as Earth, is a series of rooms filled with a myriad of screens and computer technology or the the ubiquitous presence of machines and weapons, this stands in marked contrast to the complex and beautiful living things in the jungle of the Pandora planet. It seems that Earth is no longer beautiful - raw, beauty is elsewhere! Significantly, some emphasis is placed on the fact that earthly communications and technology systems provide a connectivity, but 'nature' also has a connectivity that is unparalled and this is demonstrated by the way that the Na'vi communicate with each other, the creatures in their environment and their deity. This film may be read as science versus spirituality and the pitfalls of both.

I understand the allure and powerful feelings that might be gained from large groups of people enanating one thought into the universe, however, I still have mixed feelings about the chanting of people who evoke a god-like presence to intercede on their behalf (in Avatar also alluded to as Star Wars and the Matrix). For some reason I was not annoyed by the repetative chanting of the five notes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the use of it by scientists to contact the alien species.

Although Avatar is great to look at, I was left feeling that I'd seen it all before and heard the message, which is being repeated ad nauseum. But maybe that's what all the chanting was all about - the fact that we keep saying the same thing, but no-one in power is listening!