All the EDC blog posts » digital body http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/allposts all posts from course participants are gathered here. Click a title to visit that post and comments! Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:07:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 The Monster is Within http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/annar/2011/10/03/the-monster-is-within/ http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/annar/2011/10/03/the-monster-is-within/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:57:05 +0000 Ania Rolińska http://10.1324 Continue reading ]]> While reading Margrit Shildrick’s paper on monsters, I couldn’t help seeing parallels between a female body she uses as an exponent of a monstrous body and a digital body (being it an individual avatar or technology in general). Shildrick lists characteristics of female bodies (and the bodies of other ‘others’) such as leaky, unstable, labile, unbounded and uncontained, always in flux, subject to change, reproducing, excessive and in surplus, which assist the body in making the transition from the comfortable absence (‘comfortable’ when the body is looked at bounded and stable) to troublesome presence, whereby the body with all its frivolity and volatility imprints itself in the consciousness. It’s the celebration of the monstrous body – Shildrick proclaims at the beginning of her paper.

The reasons for such festive inclinations are numerous but the most important one is that of the need to emphasise the process, the flux, the instability as inherently natural and human.  This way she avoids positioning herself as an opponent of humanism as abandoning binary dichotomies and blurring the boundaries might establish, in her view, a  rich breeding ground, where transformation is born, which echoes the rhizome proposal of Deleuze and Guattari.

What Shildrick also stresses in her paper is the promise embodied in the liquidity, not the threat. While reading about the uncanny digital technologies last year I was not sure if the fragmentation caused by the multiplying online traces of my digital escapades and practices are something worth seeking after. I felt simultaneously attracted and threatened by the prospect, thrilled by the enhanced modes of being and feeling but alarmed by the possibility of losing sanity, succumbing to the power of my avatars, becoming dehumanised, the everlasting friction between the technoutopia and dystopia, a view still entrenched in ‘either … or’ perception of the world and subjectivity, based on binarism and thus on exclusion. The exclusion can never be complete according to Shildrick as the boundaries are liquid and permeable, allowing multiple incorporations which are at the forefront when it comes to innovation, creativity and imagination and so opening up different world, modes of being and becoming. This is a richer reality, enlarging not restricting  human subjectivity, embodying it and not disembodying.

While researching monstrous bodies I came across digital manipulations of the human body in art, crossing the boundaries between the human and machinic, between the disabled and the healthy. One of the projects struck me in particular. In the process of digital imagining the basic senes of smell, sight, taste and hearing got overgrown with thick layers of skin (thus excluded), giving an overall grim and dystopic look to the technological face, this way probably emphasising the desensitising threats. I would argue that this could be indeed the case if we persist identifying and maintaining the boundaries sealed.

The eyeless body might appear anti-human but uncannily by liquidising some of the senses and leaving one, the skin a very sensitive organ, it fosters new receptiveness.

 

 

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