Suguru Goto, from a technical, artistic, and philosophical perspective, investigates the body as a distributed phenomenon which involves questions about the other, identity, and postmodern culture. Deleuze and Guattari come to mind, but also topics as embodied, distributed cognition, action-perception loops, cyborg culture or posthumanism.

If you’ve been reading some Deleuze/Guattari, you might have met the idea of the Body without Organs, and also that of the Rhizome. In this context, it could be not too wrong to express the interest of Augmented Body and Virtual Body II - netBody like this:

A body cuts into the streams of de- and reterritorialisation. By this, it constitutes a block the specifity of which lies in that it is not only subject to an actualisation of the virtual in the process of de- and recodings, but also the subject of such an actualisation (the brain as a body, or as a special image under other images, as Bergson put it – my body is part of my brain). To me, identity seems to have a lot to do with a system experiencing that its parts makes a whole just in the sense that e.g. the hand you can observe do all these things for you simply does not leave you (this maybe is opposed to a constitution in the sense of mirror stage).

Thus, the body seems to be double: On the one hand, it constitutes a natural kind, a system demarkating itself in constantly performing a homeostasis. Mechanism connects here. On the other hand, there is meaning (maybe not signs in particular, but see the notion of the body as double in Sybille Krämer: Does the body disappear? In: Seifert, Kim, Moore (Eds.) Paradoxes of Interactivity, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008 (in print)). Social processes which actualise themselves in this peculiar domain are bound to ideological conceptions. By that, one can say that it is also ideas that cut into the streams, viz. in the order of language (which is the main topic of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense).

This is the field on which Augmented Body and Virtual Body II - netBody plays. You might have a body that is not completely yours. It functions in the context of nature as well as culture. E.g., bodies are defined by natural neccessity and possibility, as well as by social images of the order of representation, but also here there is possibility (e.g. performance), and the very processes which constitute its meaning. Now, technology sets a starting point for bringing the interactions between these two orders to attention. Conceptions of physical and social identity, physical and social alienation are spotlighted the moment that your body is not yours.

Being opened to the outside means engaging in processes which can control you, which might hurt you. You feel. Your body is controlled from the outside. You are a cyborg. You are a machine (D&G, but also Wiener: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine). What is this that happens to you? And what do you have to do with it?

Let me elaborate on the net-aspect another time ^^;

I can only tell you this much: If you’re too far away (or just too immobile to attend ^^), you can also see the whole thing on Second Life (no exclamation mark, although this is an interesting aspect). Projections from Real Life will be seen in Virtual Reality, and Projections from VR will be seen in RL. You can get there by this link: netBody on SL. Also, feel free to take a look here Rob’s blog, and here Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

^^ Some of you might have got that already, so here’s another piece of that from the last couple of months.

I mentioned this Robotic Exoskeleton in the foregoing post, so let me tell you some more about it. It is part a a perfomance artwork by Suguru Goto. I was, together with a couple of other persons, involved in the development of the shoulder mechanism. What we did was figuring out how a wearable, computer-controlled mechanism could be achieved that would allow for a a human shoulder joint to be externally controlled. We did some research into anatomy, mechanics/mechatronics, work out some ideas, built some simple prototypes, and finally came up with what we got now. It is quite a simple mechanism consisting of two motors per shoulder. Lots of testing and adjustment followed. Then it had to be integrated with other parts, i.e. elbow-, wrist-, and head control. Suguru came up with a lot of that. Here’s him and the Exoskeleton in an in-between stage:

The performance will be next Monday, a post on this is following soon. Everybody will be invited!

When i installed from GUI, using the Macports 1.6.0 .dmg version, at the end of installation I got something like “Installation Failed” which I slowly figured out to possibly be due to problems with my bash environment, since it was the post-flight script at the end of the installation process which could not be executed correctly - setting the PATH and MANPATH values is one of its jobs. This got affirmed by my bash environment missing the required settings.

Changing those manually usually is quite easy. On opening a bash shell, the .profile script would be executed. It would contain two Macports-related lines, namely:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

Anyway, this did not work on my system. I miss the .profile file at all, and creating it with the required entries does not change a thing. Leopard seems to have brought some changes that other users were experiencing as well. Actually, there is some posting on this issue, but it’s mainly inconclusive. On my friend’s machine (10.5, Intel) it just seems to work that way. So the problem seems to lie in the fact that different systems can have different bash scripts (~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, ~/.profile …).

That all really confused me. Fortunately, I met the mighty Christoph Lischka yesterday ^^. My problem is solved now, Macports up and running, my mind can peacefully flow over with what I found out:

The bash startup scripts are executed in this order: First, the /etc/bashrc, which is a system-wide setting and which I was recommended not to change at all. Second, ~/.bash_profile. Anyway, the X Windows system evaluates ~/.bashrc first. So here’s what the latter two files look like now:

~/.bash_profile:
source .bashrc

~/.bashrc:
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

So let’s see what’s going to happen next:

Ibizan Street Dirt is a suspense-packed all-thrilled lameish pack of haptic funk - the media is the streets, so we find some dry, flirritating non-clash of reduced (neo-)detroitish to romantic styles, taking long transitions to then amount to a deep and dirty breakdown of unprecedented intensity.

LISTEN HERE

1. James DIN A 4 - Lucifer Rising
2. W.B. - Gottogoaway
3. Marathon Men - Sweet Exorcist / Peter Ilyich Tschaikovsky - Coffee (Arab Dance)
4. Dave Ellesmere - Grid Variation
5. Audio Werner - Str8St8mnt
6. Shed - Supa
7. 2000 And One - Point of No Return
8. Darko Esser - 13 (Noc)
9. Gas - Untitled
10. Peter Ilyich Tschaikovsky - Coffee (Arab Dance)
11. Krause Duo Nr. 2 - Kristallsemmel
12. Omar-S - Day
]]> http://cousingirls.com/morton-shumway-ibizan-street-dirt/feed http://cousingirls.com/morton-shumway-the-inner-space-disco http://cousingirls.com/morton-shumway-the-inner-space-disco#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 13:19:29 +0000 morton http://cousingirls.com/?p=31 This wonderful little label Getting The Story Straight just came up with its third release so far.

Disjunctive ecclecticism, as found in Ibizan Street Dirt (GTSS001) and What Makes The Possible Real (GTSS002), rules this slow paced, round and sensitive mix consisting of elements from Space Disco, Material House, Reality Computing and Popular Music.

LISTEN HERE

1. Mono Puff - Pretty Fly
2. Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
3. Iz & Diz - Love Vibe (Pepe Bradock’s “Confiote De Bits” Remix)
4. Mono Puff - Pretty Fly
5. Quarks - Fallen
6. Hosomi - Kumorizoranohajimarutokoro
7. Björk - Jóga
8. Mice Parade - Double Dolphins On The Nickel
9. Asa-Chang - Kutsu #3
10. Morgan Packard - Airships Fill The Sky
11. Morgan Packard - Mink Hills
12. Yumi Kimura - Always With Me

The intense climax is reached in the second half, when layering Hosomi and Björk creates a surprising tension. The momentum, then, just carries on, as this beautiful Mice Parade song is even more intesified by Asa-Chang’s trumpet play, anti-climaxing into two accordions from two different tracks, together breathing along, making lots and lots of space for the Mink Hills, when it’s nearly time to say good-bye already …

So keep your eyes open, your ears, that is.

]]> http://cousingirls.com/morton-shumway-the-inner-space-disco/feed