Death Machines

Humans have been called death machines, genetically programmed to self destruct through a disposition to the onslaught of particular diseases. Our history tells us that we have inflicted death and damage on other human beings and creatures in our environment. Our bodies ~ more bacterial than human are periodically invaded by dangerous viruses. We create death machines capable of destroying individuals, populations and the environment. We elevate the notion of the human ~ its intellect and achievement and yet many see human life as worthless, viewed purely in terms of its use value, as pure commodity. What is this hu(man) then in this world in which the female is still the poorest of all individuals, are subject in many countries to rape, abuse, under-age marriage and slavery, where they are still the primary object of the pornographic imagination and the object in cinematic as well as game play scenarios, of attack, mutilation and humiliation? Some individuals and cultures elevate animus (spirit) above the human (homo-sapien ~ of the earth) and the value that they place on the notion of the afterlife inspires them to suppress, oppress or attempt to eradicate those who do not value their values, especially the beyond human expression of another worldly state. Likewise, those who do not applaud the notion of the resurrection of the spirit, adhere to and promote longevity as a mark of the contemporary human and one which we should all aspire to, one that finds us entering into an alliance with non-humans (animals/machines/technology) in order to enhance or extend human life, thus valorizing the human’s relationship to land/place/the environment. Philosophically the human is perceived as a ‘work in progress’, however some would argue that evolution of the human ended as soon as individuals mastered genetic engineering and became capable of altering the human genome, creating a synthetic evolution of life on earth. Life takes on different currency in virtual space in which aspects of our lives are played out in social media and other internet forums that proffer our (selves), selfies and other images as code. Traces of our lives, strange phantoms that stand as avatars of our imagination, together with electronic footprints of our monetary and other transactions form a picture of the human as information that can be circulated ad infinitum. Indeed these ephemeral and ghostly aspects of self continue long after the demise, decomposition or cremation of the material body. Our ‘humanity’ then, alive or dead, material (actual) or virtual, animus (spirit) or of the earth, a conglomeration of hybridity is a hotly contested zone of enquiry. The question remains: how can we be ‘anything but (except) human’? Might we aspire to be anything beside (outside) the human, indeed, how may this otherness be imagined? Is this quest to be beyond the human pure fantasy, simply a desire to be different from, an escape from the pleasures and perils of being such.

Stelarc Suspension Event + Scott Livesey Gallery - March 2012

What can an artist hope to achieve by repeating actions that he accomplished twenty four years ago, especially since those events or actions are so well documented and discussed in the public domain and within academia? I ask this question because the performance artist Stelarc recently undertook a short suspension event at Scott Livesey Gallery in Armadale in Melbourne, which involved the insertion of sixteen sharp steel shark hooks into his back, thighs, calves and arms. Apparently he was suspended above the large sculpture of his ear on arm for approximately sixteen minutes. I was not invited to the performance event so may only undertake a reading based on my viewing of various photographs floating around the internet and one in particular (the photographer unacknowledged) printed on page three of the Age Newspaper on Wednesday 14 March 2012. I’ve re-photographed a section of the photograph which is above.

My immediate reactions were that this was nothing new for Stelarc who has performed many suspension events between 1976 and 1988; so I asked myself what is this repetition and duplication about? Perhaps the insertion of the hooks, metaphorically representing the intrusion of technology into the body serve to underscore the sculptural form, which itself mirrors the actual ear growing on Stelarc’s arm and speaks to the way that contemporary biomedicine may be deployed in order to modify the human form. In both the suspension event and the ear on arm operation, the skin on Stelarc’s body was stretched in order to accommodate an alien construct, one incommensurate with human bodily material. And this suspension event in which technology enters the body for a minimal period of time is contrasted with a permanently implanted technology, one that has now been fully incorporated in Stelarc’s body and psyche. Since technology is no longer antithesis to the human condition what does Stelarc’s artwork say to us in the 21^st Century? Is he simply restating his initial position about ubiquitous technology and its obvious impact on human and non-human life forms, or does it broach a wider philosophical viewpoint. I’m drawn immediately to Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, because of the clear weight he places on his return to past actions and their echo in more recent work, however it is to Nietsche’s embracing of life in its joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain that resonates for me in this work, but perhaps that’s too easy a reading, or one that I am most comfortable with whilst considering this recent performance event. For, as much as I would like to perceive this as ‘new’ it IS a return to early body imagery and action.

I imagine that since Stelarc would not have undertaken this performance lightly, then we too must give it the seriousness it deserves and not only focus upon the pain that he experienced or the reaction of those witnessing the event (noted prominently in Ashley Crawford’s write up of the event in the Age), for my knowledge of Stelarc’s process is that he would have considered any pain experienced necessary for him to undertake the performance and to present the philosophical aspects, therefore pain is a byproduct, rather than emphasis or outcome of the event. Of course, I did notice (in the Age photograph) that Stelarc’s head was quite blushed and I assume that the reddish coloration may have been caused by an anxiety response to the pain or the situation, but I say this only as an aside, for I am mostly interested in the body politic and in this particular instant the aesthetics or contrast between the very warm and fleshy architectural aspects and presence of Stelarc’s naked body, against and above what we can only imagine as the cold, hard surface of the ear on arm sculpture. The body moving, the sculpture in stasis; Stelarc’s fluid body, swaying, changeable from moment to moment; the sculpture fixed, immoveable, a mere simulacrum of the original body; active and passive components inhabiting the space of the gallery. The white walls, the white sculpture, and Stelarc’s fleshy body tones, a play of difference; a passionate display of gasping breath and bleeding flesh in the somewhat sterile conditions of the orderly and rational exhibition space. The perfect, unflawed, large-scale ear on arm, a tricky object to contemplate alongside the imperfect aging and damaged flesh that hangs like so much meat to be penetrated, severed, re(organ)ized and ultimately if need be, modified and adapted by technology. If Stelarc’s performance event at Lorne last year revealed vulnerability of the human body and suggested a rebirth or resurrection, then this performance also reiterates that position.

Julie Clarke (copyright 2012)

Ephemeral Skin

Just finished reading 'The Great Ephemeral Skin', the first chapter of Jean-François Lyotard's book Libidinal Economy (Theories of Contemporary Culture), 1974. I adopted the mode of flâneus - ready to be seduced, eager to offer myself up to the experience of navigating new terrain, equipped with the notion (provided by Beornn) that my exhibition of fragmented body parts reminded him of the Lyotard's libidinal skin, I entered the pages, vigilant to the similarities, excited by the prospect of an incendiary to heat my soul. I was not disappointed. Lyotard begins with the words:
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelid, set with lashes — but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress-maker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestine's alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins (1).

The remainder of the chapter is an equal mind-fuck as the first. You stroll along - A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. ('Anti-Oedipus', Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) seduced by one encounter only to be lead off (or do you lead yourself?) into another. There were many points along the way where I faltered, having to read twice, taking a step backward or forward again, unsteady and still left with the intensity of the reading rather than feeling that I fully understood. So rather than being able to offer anything coherent to you the reader, there are instead nodes, points of interest for me, words and sentences that resonate. It was towards the end of the chapter when Lyotard was speaking about the cry of the woman who sees her husband looking at the face of another and the husbands' declaration that her cry is what I seek most in the world, like death, the only certainty...he needs her suffering to know he is loved, he needs the intensity of his wife's jealously, which produces a circuit one to the other and even beyond them. The relationship between sadist and masochist - an electric shock. And although her cry emanates from her throat, it bursts through her lips - mouth or vulva, they are affixed in the pain of her knowing. Seduced so far, I read the lines: The vulva is jealous of the thoroughly kissed mouth, so is the mistress of the book her lover writes, the man of the young man's future, the sun of the closed shutters behind which your imagination lets itself go in its adventures of reading (41). Even the shriek, which dissipates into the air may be a zone of pleasure as it bounces off another surface, all surfaces are possible planes of intensity. Your hand on the table his hand rests upon although it's not on your shoulder, connectivity acknowledged, the spark possible even through splintered wood. Is this romance?

I'm enjoying this book thus far because it works against the notion of Mommy, Daddy, Me and psychoanalysis, the notion of interiority, to one in which body exterior and inscription of bodily regions is privileged. So, I look again at my moving mouth - five seconds in which I press my tongue hard against the inner lips, move it around, make almost undecipherable sounds and it is not as one might think (and I for a brief second thought myself of the infant prior to language acquisition or the adult wishing to return to a time in order to be inarticulate, to dissolve knowledge to create a pre-human or post-human state) but may be considered instead as Liz Grosz proposes, as a zone continually in the process of being produced, renewed, transformed, through experimentation, practices, innovation...the coming together of surfaces...there is nothing infantile about these regions, insofar as to be effective, to function as the site of orgasmic intensity, they must continually be invested through activity, use. (Sexy Bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism 1995:289). My exhibition Ephemeral Skin is showing at Skin Gallery February - March 2013. Details click here.
If you would like to see the images in the exhibition click here

If you are interested in my recent drawings and paintings completed during April 2013 click here
May paintings and drawings are here

Posthuman imagination

Mouth (moving image made with a Panasonic/Lumix digital camera. Julie Clarke (2011)

In a posthuman world identity becomes a paradox - image, after all IS everything - become who you want to become, but it's also nothing because your face and body may be changed at will as long as you have the funds for high end technological interface with Second Life, you've got so much money you can spend it on virtual clothes and accessories, a virtual house and land and even construct a business or territory to lord over in your resplendent avatar, fantasy you, oh you beautiful fantasy post, post human you. If you have access to advanced medical technologies (cosmetic surgery, liposuction, medical intervention) you can modify your visage, indeed, so complex a scenario that your arse can end up on your face, your rectum in an entirely different part of your body, your heart not your own but that of a pig. In a Deleuzian fantasy we could have a one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate, regurgitate your own waste and devour it again - primate holding its own excrement looks out at the human who for all purposes keeps his animal nature at bay. The body merely a waste disposal unit, the body a machine more than human, but maybe more than, more than human in its ability to tolerate shit. And your breast, not of your mother but already inculcated into self, forever psychically attached to your own suckling mouth, may be redesigned to project from any part of your body, enclosed beneath a sheer top - well that's got to seduce someone, even if it's only yourself. Language from the mouth, undecipherable, incoherent, base, abject, discarded as pure dribble, leaks from the closed orifice in a scream of 'Not me, not post human! And yet the cry IS remake me, place me on the autopsy table, reassemble the fragmented pieces into something different, something other, because the prior configuration, damaged, deranged, no longer functions. My mouth, culture/nurture all rolled into the one gesture of yearning and longing remains mute in some insidious landscape of desire not of my making at all. If the libidinal band glows hot then it does so in fits and bursts, heating up and cooling down in this make-shift body, neither human, animal or machine, but all as one in a mad symphony of the post human imagination.

Wind farms blow an ill wind

A Senate inquiry into wind farms heard evidence last week that the largest wind farm in Australia, at Waubra, near Ballarat, had been causing health problems for people living close by for the past two years. A doctor treating some told ABC-TV the cause was unknown, but its effect was measurable when the wind farms turbines were operating.

Victoria has the most polluting power station in the world, at Hazelwood, and a deadline of generating 25% of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2020 to meet.

Waubra wind farm operator Acciona Energy told the Senate Inquiry they believed their neighbors health issues were real, but doubted the wind farm by itself caused them. Acciona Energy and other wind farm operators receive government grants through the Renewable Energy Target funding scheme. Another operator told the inquiry complaints about wind farms are so few they should be dismissed out of hand. But the new Liberal Victorian government is proposing a two kilometer buffer around wind farms, a suggestion that outraged environmental activists Friends of the Earth. Spokesperson Cam Walker told the ABC thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are on the line if wind farm operators cannot build near people's homes.

Victoria needs to boost energy supplies to cope with growing demand from an expanding population. The operators of the Hazelwood power station expect to be burning 18 million tonnes of coal each year for the next 25 years or more.

Aside from electricity, wind farms bring wealth and economic activity and steady income to country regions dependent upon the vagaries of drought and flooding rains. Some wind farms are community owned and operated, like the The Hepburn Community Wind Park Cooperative at Leonards Hill, south of Daylesford. As more wind farms are built the State will become more economically productive, and can expect a larger share of tax revenue for effort from the Commonwealth treasury as a result. Everyone is happy, and the establishment of large scale wind farms in regional Victoria looks for all the world like a grass-roots effort toward to a better society.

So why would the new Victorian government rock the boat, and slow the gravy train down?

Almost counter-intuitively, wind farms totter if not on the edge of sustainability then close enough to sweat about falling off.

The sun provides all the world's energy, one way or another. Burning coal and other fossil fuels releases energy stored since the sun shone on a very different, carboniferous age. The sun heats the earth and causes weather, waves, and the wind. While a rustic waterwheel or modern windmill takes some energy from those, the climate has some energy spare.

But energy taken from the weather by wind farms cannot be later put back, and in the opinion of geoscientists

"...climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2"

and

"Given that only 0.03 TW of wind-derived electricity was produced in 2008, there is still substantial wind power development possible with relatively minor climatic impacts. However, future plans for large-scale wind power development must recognize the finite potential of the Earth system to generate kinetic wind energy." (pdf)

In other words, wind farms are only sustainable in the short term. If we build too many, the weather will change as if we burned twice the coal we do now. I'll say that again another way. There is a price for everything, and energy is no exception. Only a finite number of wind farms can exist before their numbers take too much energy out of the wind for it to keep on blowing the way it does now.

Australia has an abundance of cheap energy from coal, an accident of luck. But I don't know whether it is just to take wind from the sails of other nations on purpose, getting in first to maintain a comparative advantage.

I wonder what Murray Bookchin would have thought of this wind farm affair. "...the natural world itself is not cooptable. The complexity of organic and climatic processes still defies scientific control, just as the marketplace's drive to expand still defies social control" he wrote in 1991. Bookchin argued that the environmental movement was indistinguishable from economics premised upon a supposedly unavoidable conflict between insatiable needs and scarce natural resources, the so called Dismal Science of Thomas Carlyle.

In Enemy of the People, an 1882 play by Henrik Ibsen about a commercial enterprise that makes people ill, one character asserts that in moral matters the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by demagoguery and the promise of easy money. While Ibsen has long since been claimed by the sisterhood as an early proponent of feminism in A Doll's House, Enemy of the People puts the individual at the centre of things, a distinctly humanist view.

And one that might be shared at the top of a new, Liberal, Victorian Government determined to stamp its mark.

Green politics is a posthuman, if not extropian, anti-humanist project that reverberates with themes of humility, introspection, and passivity consistent with the politics of European Feudalism. Green prophet Arne Næss taught that humans only had potential as part of a diverse whole, the ecosphere, where every thing, human, animal, vegetable and so on, has an equal right to be. I don't think there has been such a mystical political movement as the Greens since the Dark Ages. Which weren't really dark at all, just nothing much changed for hundreds of years.

Anathema to the humanist, reformist administration the Victorian Liberals aspire to be.

go to the next post in this thread

Mechanists and Shapers

I'm responding here to a comment made by Steve underneath his image 'the load-bearing spirit' (21.01.11) that the cyborg is motion and flow and unfinished and becoming and direct and moving and still, all at once. I should say that I see a vast difference between the cyborg of science fiction films, which is almost always more machine than human, real-life individuals with medical prosthesis and the cybernetic body associated with virtual technologies, although in theory they all get thrown into the mix. I agree with Steve, the human (posthuman) is a continuum, rather than an event and this is where the notion of becoming comes into play.

My current thought is that the cyborg will be surpassed in the future by the opportunistic human who avails themselves of advanced biomedical technologies. This genetically modified human, will take designer drugs to ward off dementia and prolong life, her failing tissue and internal organs replaced by specifically designed tissue-engineered ones that avoid rejection. Her diseased tissue replaced with those from an genetically modified 'human friendly' animal, her outer body surgically modified to conform to current standards of beauty. But for a long time we will live in a world inhabited by altered humans, one that Bruce Sterling described in 1983 as two distinct future states of being ~ a world of posthuman shapers ~ genetically engineered or surgically modified individuals and mechanists, those with prosthetically modified bodies. Eventually, even prosthetic limbs will look more life like, so much so that the new cyborg will be unidentifiable as such.

Synthetic Biology!

Scientific American reported last week that 'The first microbe to live entirely by genetic code synthesized by humans has started proliferating at a lab in the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Venter and his colleagues used a synthetic genome—the genetic instruction set for life—to build and operate a new, synthetic strain of Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria...' (Bello, 2010) What they omitted to tell the general public is that Mycoplasma mycoides is a parasite that lives in ruminants (cattle and goats) causing lung disease.

This is not the first time scientists have created synthetic viruses. David Whitehouse reported on the BBC News in 2002 that scientists had created a synthetic polio virus and although smallpox has been eradicated, specimens of it are held in laboratories in the United States and Russia. Theoretically, it could be recreated and used as a biological weapon. However, since only a few scientists have the skills to create synthetic organisms, one imagines that they would never be involved in undertaking anything that would jeopardise human life. To produce a biological weapon, one not only requires skill to create the virus, the ability to store and preserve them, but also to disperse them efficiently for a successful terrorist attack. Tucker and Zilinkas, (2006) argue that synthetic biology itself will not lead to an increase in terrorism, but they do identity 'lone operators' and 'bio-hackers' as individuals likely to present real problems. They identify a 'lone operator' as a highly skilled biologist who may have a grudge against an individual or government and a 'bio-hacker' is someone who may attempt to make a synthetic virus to show his prowess!

Indeed, it may not be rogue individuals or countries that we need worry about. There is some concern that the reasons given for creating synthetic biological agents may in fact be masking the real agenda, which is to create organisms/agents that have a dual use - some that are beneficial to mankind, others which are not.

There will be ongoing debates as to whether these synthetic organisms may be considered as living and whether those creating them are tampering with nature ~ I think, that whilst this may be interesting on a number of levels, perhaps, rather than being concerned about these questions, we might instead ask: Who will benefit in the long term from this technology? Will it end up benefiting only those in the West, but be inhibiting for poorer countries? What safeguards are in place during the experimental phase of the technology that will ensure that microbes, such as Mycoplasma mycoides don't proliferate and escape from the laboratory environment? What might the outcomes be if a synthetic biological organism infiltrates a 'natural' one? Many questions need to be answered. In the meantime scientists continue to create clones, genetically engineer organisms and transplant organs and other genetic material from animal to humans. Much of what they are undertaking cannot be understood by the general public, that is why it's important that we have experts who understand the science and technology and endeavour to impart it in very clear terms to the ordinary person.

Tucker, J.B., Zilinskas, R.A., (2006), 'The promise and perils of synthetic biology', The Atlantis news, Spring, 2006.

Whitehouse David , 'First Synthetic Virus Created, BBC News, 11 July, 2002.

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
__________________________________________________
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.

SPECIES

Interior view of eating area, Australia on Collins, Melbourne. Photo: Julie Clarke, 2009

Apparent order viewed from a lofty position.

Post-Human/body modification/technology/artists

Comprehensive list of my writings on the post-human, body modification, technology and artists:
(I've removed the list because basically it is in my Selected Curriculum Vitae posted July, 2010.)

Doubly Monstrous: Female and Disabled

This article was published last year in 'Essays in Philosophy', Humboldt State University, California.

In the article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film Cremaster (2002), David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970) and David Lynch’s short film The Amputee (1973). Although I do cite other films as well. I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/clarkjj.html

I've posted this entry today because last night I attended a lecture delivered by Barbara Creed, in which she contextualised sexual displays and rituals by various bird species (footage gleaned from David Attenborough) alongside similar displays by women in Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s. Barbara argued that not only were women portrayed as beautiful, fecund and essential for propagating the human species (showing the influence of Darwinian thought on cinema), but were purposefully dressed or displayed (often in flower shapes, holding or wearing fruit, or as part of a interwoven pattern) so as to be perceived as part of the complexity of nature. I was interested in how in a number of instances women were augmented in such a way that they became icons of excess that bordered on the grotesque.

Barbara Creed's new book is entitled: Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (MUP Academic Monographs, 2009).

I Survive Only As Code

Clone - Julie Clarke - Exogenous, Public Office, Stairwell Gallery, 100 Adderley St., West Melbourne (July), 1999

In 1999 I was gathering thoughts and began to think about life and death, the seen and unseen. The writing was intended to address cyberspace, however I was drawn into thinking about the film the Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan,1999). Within the narrative, spirits who carry the inscription of the cause of their death are phantoms that inhabit and haunt the psyche of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). In traditional horror genre, revulsion is derived by the representation of body mutilation, disease and deterioration of bodily flesh; and the visceral presence which inscribe these phantoms confront the viewer with their own mortality and fear of untimely and traumatic death. In this film it is not only the frightening representations of damaged bodies that is confronting, but the fact that death has somehow entered into the space of the child who sees these apparitions and simultaneously hears the messages they transmit. After thinking about this I wrote:

Cyberspace is like this, a site of death where the undead roam the space of non-forms within text which moves forever and ever, receding into a soft hiss in a cool void. There is no real passion in cyberspace and so the non-body, the electric body (and we all desire to be electric bodies) is stimulated by the screen – soliciting a strange knowledge and intimacy with the other, as the non-space of ourselves.

In both these examples the human body is perceived as colonised by an unseen energy. I was reminded of the rhetoric deployed by those involved with the Heaven’s Gate cult who believed that aliens from the Evolutionary Level Above Human (HALE backwards), incarnated and took over human bodies. This cult solicited much interest after the bodies of 39 men and women were found after they committed suicide. The cult members, some of which had been castrated were found dressed in black jeans and tee shirts. The web-site was closed down and the CIA declared it a crime site, inscribing the video images as abject.

The unseen controller is a theme that runs through the history of humankind and continues in contemporary discourse.

In his beautifully illustrated and poetic text Angels, A Modern Myth (1988) Michel Serres uses angels as a metaphor of all things carried or transmitted and finds a magical quality in this bridge between the physical and non-physical world. It is interesting to note that as carriers and transmitters, Serres does not associate angels with viruses because this would afford them negative connotations. Although Angels inhabit space, they do not enter human bodies.

According to Serres angels are responsible for almost everything '...they send jailers to sleep and set prisoners free' and '…can pass through windows...' (1998:.84) Angels are the bridge, the essence contained in all things and all events. Almost everything may be explained by the existence of these angels. Somewhere in Serres description of angels as metaphors there is a fundamental notion that humanity is not responsible for its actions, and the writers desire for lightness and flight is symptomatic of a fear of corporeality and its legacy of disease, liminality and alienation.

Later in 1999 I held an exhibition entitled Exogenous; I included a digital image of a hybrid face (a combination of a photograph of my Auntie before she drowned at twelve years of age and my own face, cloned and distorted). Not only did the faces become alien, but in making the image an 'alien' face appeared in the middle of the dark section. On the image I wrote the words: 'I survive only as code'. I was thinking about how this image could be circulated throughout media and that in fact my Auntie who died too soon would somehow be resurrected as electronic information/digital code. When I consider my own websites and the citations of my writing and other work on the internet I realise that in many ways, not only do we live much of our lives being electric bodies of text based communication, but that evidence of mind, if not mind itself, continues as electronic information.

We Are All Eukayra (2)

Thanks to Bruce Dickson for providing me with this link:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/eukaryotasy.html

If you would like to know more about this check blogpost in August.

THE PARADOX OF THE POSTHUMAN

I found a thread this morning on the Extropy chat list between Natasha Vita-More, president of the Extrophy Insitute, Stephano Vaj (artist & commentator) & Damien Broderick (science fiction writer) who were discussing my book: The Paradox of the Posthuman: Science Fiction/Techno-Horror Films and Visual Media,VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2009.

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2009-July/052356.html
Click on message or previous message to follow the thread.

Apparently my 'critical studies language' is annoying, they are pleased that I mention Max More (transhuman and futurist philosopher) and that my popular culture references are useful to transhumanist theories (particularly my chapter on Alien Resurrection). Funniest thing was Natasha wanted to know whether to call me Dr or Ms if she meets with me in Melbourne in November this year. Perhaps she is attending the 'Super Human: Revolution of the Species' Conference? I must email her and make contact.

I'm happy to report that my book is in the National Library of Australia and many University libraries and that the Univesity of Melbourne has asked me to present a lecture on 'Transhumanism' in 2010.

In the past two decades the concept of the posthuman has emerged within philosophy, science fiction, cultural studies and contemporary art. Since it is co-existent with the growth of advanced medical and communication technologies, the posthuman is framed by ideas of mutation, evolution and the development of a species that re-writes what is generally conceived as human. The definition of the posthuman draws on both humanist and anti-humanist concepts that suggest a profound paradox. This book explores the nature of these paradoxes in popular culture, film and art. It examines the way paradox is central to the very nature of the posthuman and considers the changes, contradictions and ideologies inherent in the posthuman and how these affect discourses of the body. In particular it provides close readings of the films Alien Resurrection, GATTACA, Crash and Strange Days. This book is ideal for those interested in philosophical anthropology, anti-humanism, eugenics, genetic engineering, prosthetics, ethics, science fiction films, performance art and cinema studies. (Backcover of my book).

Hannah Arendt + The Human Condition (1958)

"Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors" (Hannah Arendt)


Evil: The crime against humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc1.html

INTERSPECIES

Artists collaborating with animals

Wearable Exoskeleton

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/cyborg-exoskeletons-may-soon-become-common-bicycles

HeLa- a new species?

HeLa
Some researchers have proposed the Hela as a new species in its own right: the name proposed has been “Helacyton gartleri”.

Super Human: Revolution of the Species

With support by ANAT (who approved my application) and with funding from the University of Melbourne, I will be attending the "Super Human: Revolution of the Species" Masterclass being held in Melbourne 25-26 November, 2009 at Federation Square.

Masterclass is being conducted by: Erich Berger, Oron Catts, Kathy Cleland, Sarah Cook, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Tina Gonsalves, Jens Hauser, Douglas Kahn, George Poonkhin Khut, Kim Machan, Lizzie Muller, Angela Main, Christiane Pau, Helen Stuckey and Paul Thomas.
http://www.superhuman.org.au/

Just being human...

Posthuman? Just being human is hard enough!