I survive only as code?

Clone - Julie Clarke - Exogenous, Public Office, Stairwell Gallery, West Melbourne, 1999

 

Last night I was having a discussion with Shaun about the Pell and Dawkins Q & A session a few days ago; about matter and anti-matter, the visible and unseen world, quantum theory (not that I know much about that) and spirituality. At one stage we went outside to look at the evening sky and it was clear and full of small bright stars. I told Shaun the story of how Erin and I had seen last year, quite by accident a comet racing across the sky. This made me think of the Heaven's Gate cult and how members believed that a space-craft that would take them away to a higher level of existence was trailing the Hale Bop comet that passed over the Earth in 1997.  According to Wiki, the Hale Bop comet was the most seen or observed comet of the 20th century and it was also the brightest. I actually wrote part of this blog post in 2009, so thought that I would revisit and re-post it this morning since it deals in part with  some of what Shaun and I were discussing. We both agreed that not knowing was probably a healthier state of mind, rather than the position of knowing, which can engender dogmatic viewpoints.

In 1999 I was gathering thoughts and began to think about life and death, the visible and unseen in relation to cyberspace, however I was drawn into thinking about 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 an untimely and traumatic death. In this film it is not only the frightening representations of damaged bodies that is confronting to the child, but the fact that death has somehow entered his space, and he see 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 colonized by an unseen energy. I was also 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 writer’s 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 or digital code. When I consider my own websites and the citations of my writing and other work on the Internet I realize 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.

Collisions: Julie Clarke + Mark McDean (23.11.2011)

GATC: Julie Clarke 2011 ~ Vintage doily with lace trimming, circular insert covered with acrylic paint and fake gold leaf. Kewpie doll bound and attached to doily with black upholstery cotton.

My response is an intuitive one based on the fact that in Mark's last artwork he was not only creating a momento mori but was also making reference to his grandmother. I thought that I would approach this notion of remembering my mortality as a return to childhood ~ an embrace of death and life. The lace doily is an object that featured prominently in my grandmother's house where I lived for a few years. These delicate, circular objects, worked with nimble fingers graced the top of her sideboard as well as the highly polished dining table. So,  the doily for me, inherently points to nurturing as well as decoration. However, here I am using the doily as representing intricate patterns in our lives ~ objects around us or biological connections, hence the reference to GATC ~ Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine (nucleotides that make up our DNA). The Kewpie (or Cupie) doll named after the naked cupid is considered a symbol of love and desire, and I recall them being attached to a long wooden stick and sold at the Royal Melbourne Show; much to the delight of small girls who would covet them. More importantly in terms of the work, is the fact that I see nature and nurture, as well as highly constructed codes as impacting on the naked child.

Source Code, a short film review

It is not unusual in the science fiction genre for alien entities to take on human form or use the human body as a host. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) had a different take, it revolved around the notion of one person inhabiting the body of another through their dreams, likewise, the notion of humans invading or possessing another real or virtual human body via biological/technological interface has become more prevalent in the genre at least since Hans Moravic pronounced in Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), that one day we may be able to download human consciousness into a computer. The assumption being that consciousness (as function of mind or brain) is separate from the meat body and this informational pattern or energy can be used as raw source code in a computer program. A worrying concept indeed, because considered in this light human subjectivity is defined solely by the disembodied mind.
Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) takes Moravic's notion of downloading human consciousness to the nth degree, in that, not only is the consciousness of Colter Stevens' (Jake Gyllenhaal) downloaded into a computer but it also enters that of Sean, a man traveling on a Chicago commuter train that blows up eight minutes later. When Steven's first realizes that he is not himself and is thrust between one reality, one identity and another, he assumes he's involved in a military simulation. This is partly due to the fact that he finds himself (when he's not on the train in the body of another) strapped into a confined, cock-pit like space with only a small screen in front of him, which enables communication with the outside world.
Goodwin and Rutledge the scientists in charge of an operation called Beleaguered Castle, flash playing cards on the screen in front of him as memory prompts. Interesting enough, Beleaguered Castle is a game of solitaire that requires concentration, patience, skill and an ability to work out a puzzle and this is exactly what is required of Steven's in his strange and alien space. Goodwin and Rutledge explain to him that he's not in a sim, but a real situation and must return again and again to the train and the last eight minutes of Sean's life in order to find out the identity of the terrorist and stop the detonation of the second bomb.
It is made quite clear in the film that Steven's consciousness and Sean's are identical in that the source code (residual memory traces) is only accessible (and therefore usable in that an intervention can take place to change the natural course of an event) in the last eight minutes of a person's life. It is not, as Steven imagines, a temporal slippage between the past and the present, but more like the scenario in Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) in which precogs, gifted human humans who can see into the future are interfaced with the Precrime unit in order to predict crimes that can be interrupted before they occur.
Both Minority Report and Source Code raise the age old philosophical question as to whether the future is set or if free will can change the course of history. Steven's who has been told that he cannot save those on board the train since it was blown up prior to his consciousness hijacking Sean's, but that he can intervene, find the bomber and avert a future disaster, goes against the grain and believes that he can return to the event and change the eventual outcome.
I really enjoyed this film because it made me think about time in a different way. I haven't quite put my finger on how, but it lingers in my mind in the strangest way as I write.

Repetitition and Difference: Torch

Image from my journal 1991.

Digital images of black and white paintings done by me in 1991.

We are almost certain that fire is precisely the first object, the first phenomena, on which the human mind reflected; among all phenomena, fire alone is sufficiently prized by prehistoric man to wake in him the desire for knowledge, and this is mainly because it accompanies the desire for love. (Gaston Bachelard)

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the (symbolic) repetitions of death... (Gilles Deleuze ‘Répétition et différence, 1968).

Repetition and Difference is a project that revisits an older body of work entitled Torch that was never exhibited. It is an attempt to reanimate, restart or repeat. In 1991 two theoretical issues inspired the project. Firstly, my reading of Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1968), which provided a rich analysis of the significance of fire to the human psyche—particularly life, death and expression. Secondly, I had an interest in the growing rhetoric of genetics and its reduction of human complexity to a fixed code. In my visual journal at that time I covered a page with multiple black and white photocopied images of a torch covered with a large red X (the mark made as a signature by those who cannot read or write, which homogenized their identity and erased their individuality—also X is a sex-determining chromosome ). Next to this image I wrote: 'multiple images are cellular compartments each containing their own unique characteristics – like genetic codes they differ slightly one from the other'. I was attempting to articulate that human difference was important and that it was through visual and written language that our difference and passion is expressed. Much of my creative endeavors have circulated around text and image, writing and art. The visual impetus for this project actually came from 1990 magazine photograph of Peter Garrett (Australian musician, environmentalist and politician) holding a torch.

After several journal entries I embarked on a series of 30 monochromatic paintings on 8” x 10” artist board (see examples above) that included similar elements—a torch, surrounded by amorphous shapes that could be perceived as stick figures of humans, horses, dogs, birds and planes—as hieroglyphs, or simply bits of information. Each successive painting provided a variation on the original, in that the size and location of the elements was slightly changed so that when placed side by side they appeared as distinct cells of an animation. Engaging in these paintings, which depicted difference and repetition affirmed for me ways in which meaning and language could be disrupted through mutation. This repetition and transmutation of the forms engaged on some level with genetics, technology and communication, since black mark making on a white ground is commonplace in writing, typing, photo-coping and film-making. Using black, white and shades of gray, rather than color enabled me to invert usual expectations of a flame, which evokes warmth, glow, fire and light. Indeed the paintings seemed to me at that time to be more about the language of painting and how we make meaning from limited forms – a comment I suppose on how genetics appears to try and fix human nature, rather than its boundlessness.

In 2008, with the assistance of Community Media Services in Melbourne I digitally photographed the 30 paintings so that I could repeat existing images, manipulate them in Photoshop and create an animation.This proved very time consuming and is still not finished. I'd love to see the original paintings installed side by side on a wall. What I need to do is find a wall.

Review of Murray McKeich: pzombie by Julie Clarke (2007)

Murray McKeich: pzombie
http://tmp.acp.org.au/archives/2007/pzombie.php

‘A FACE TO COME, OR ALREADY PAST’: A REFLECTION ON

MURRAY MCKEICH’S PZOMBIE EXHIBITION

Julie Clarke© February 2007

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In their discussion of the importance of the face in communication, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari said ‘All faces envelope an unknown, unexplored landscape, all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past’ (1987:173).It is with this concept in mind that I approach Murray McKeIch’s exhibition entitled pzombie, a word that evokes the uncontrolled territory of the body’s internal functions.1 For this exhibition McKeich has collected detritus from the urban environment, such as chicken bones, plastic flowers, the rims of eyeglasses, twigs, vegetables, shoes, tickets, a plastic ruler, damaged dolls as well as other objects that cannot be identified in the final composite images. These items were then scanned and incorporated into bust length portraits of fantastical beings. By doing this he literally creates the face that reflects a landscape not only inhabited with people and structural elements, but also with the refuse associated with personal consumption, memory and history. The face displayed in this manner becomes a site of adornment and revelation that goes beyond the range of usual facial expressions.In spite of this, McKeich’s entities appear to cover a range of human emotions including—happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disappointment, pain, joy and anger, however some facial expressions cannot be read as solely human, since the upper and lower lips are elevated or extended beyond the range of normal facial muscle function.The iconic images evoke the heads of heroic individuals represented on coins and stamps as well as Victorian photographic portraits set within an oval frame on a black background. McKeich’s use of this traditional mirror-shape and his construction of the right and left sides of the faces as exact copies of each other, producing absolute symmetry not found in nature, implies that the work is about memory and recognition, reality and fantasy, perfection and imperfection, as well as identity mediated through technological interface. However, since McKeich has used a computer application program that draws upon the scanned elements to form endless visual combinations, his control over the end product is assisted by his resolve to intimate the corporeal. He has accomplished this by setting parameters, so that the individual scanned elements fall within the shape of the human body. McKeich presents the face as an abstract machine formed from a white surface punctuated with deep blacks holes. A face is nothing without holes—the eyes, the nose and an opened mouth. Although human or animal eyes may be clearly seen behind the black holes on these highly ornate and mask-like faces, the mouths appear as cutouts, creating a deep enveloping void that cannot be penetrated. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have noted ‘…there is something absolutely inhuman about the face’ (1987:170). This is primarily because they considered ‘everything a machine’, or rather that the human becomes non-human in machine culture (1977). McKeich’s desire to hand over to a machine, what we would usually consider the creative aspect of making art, is an example of the human becoming non-human, however, his humanity, if you like is maintained by his selection of discarded objects, the construction of parameters and his intervention into the images at various points of their assemblage.1 Our autonomic nervous system is self-controlling and independent of outside influences. It controls our heartbeat, blood flow, respiration and other bodily functions related to the human body, and is referred to as the zombie body.2 Elements from the organic and synthetic world fuse together in these images eliciting notions of the cyborg—a state in which nature and culture, human and machine amalgamate. One might be lead to believe that these creatures belong in the realm of science fiction, where elements of different species and machines threaten to integrate with and pollute each other. Since these fantastical entities are neither human nor animal they suggest a new species one that can only emerge through technological intervention. It is in this sense that the works invite us to contemplate new perceptions of the human body engendered by advanced communication and medical technologies. Whilst there are precedents from within art history, such as the Baroque, nature painting, still life, portraiture, fantasy art and Surrealism that may be read in relation to McKeich’s images, they bear a resemblance to those of the Italian Renaissance painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo whose allegorical paintings of the four seasons and the four elements, consisted of animals, flowers, trees, hay, fruit and vegetables, goblets, jewelry, armor and other man-made objects formed to suggest a human face. In particular McKeich’s portraits are suggestive of Arcimboldo’s 1591 painting entitled Vertummu a portrait of Emperior Rudolf II, who collected exotic animals and was a patron of the arts and sciences. Like Arcimboldo’s paintings McKeich’s work engages with notions of the grotesque, parody and mimicry. Keich’s images demonstrate mutation, transformation and a process of becoming other, which simultaneously suggests the same, since each image appears as an amalgam of the others. The oval form implies homogeneity, however since each contains a complex blueprint, the human genetic code and its ability to create heterogeneity between individuals is evoked. The outer layers of these marvelous entities reveal a sophistication and complexity, as though the interlaced interior of their bodies was being worn on the outside. These exoskeletons, if you like become masks that signify our total integration into consumer society and its technological mediation. If we imagine these entities as existing beyond their frame then they appear as strange attractors to other beings that might delight in their complex adornment. Their exquisite beauty and symmetry invites a desire to know more, to move beyond the surface to what lies beneath its formidable shell. If the face is a kind of landscape, then these faces are littered with detritus that is rendered valuable. Indeed ‘Maddern Square’, the silent animation that accompanied the pzombie exhibition displays gold colored as well as monochromatic images that float together in a transparent ethereal field and suggest a mechanism that operates through a harmonious energy generated from a slow transmitting pulse. There are no obvious faces in this animation, only topography of the invaluable made precious. Incongruous elements that hint at biological or perfunctory life throughout the non-delineated structure are permeated with a quiescent flow of electrical energy. Occasionally our eye settles on a recognizable form—wire-mesh or netting, small flowers, stars and leaves, plastic tubing, strings of beads, thread, a plastic ruler and bone fragments and it is then that we return to the images of the motionless faces, which appear indelibly linked to animation and human expression.

References:

Gilles, Deleuze and Guattari, Félix (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

Translation and Forward by Brian Massumi, Mnneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press.

(1977) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York, Viking Press.