FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES and KEN OKIISHI: The Evolution and Representation of Experience

The two artists Ken Okiishi and Felix Gonzalez-Torres--though separated by a generation--both use physical objects to signify the loss of human presence, connection or connections. Both instill meaning into familiar physical objects such as candy, clocks, or television screens, and both are able to provoke feelings associated with the kinds of presence objects can represent – without that actual presence. Gonzalez-Torres worked during a time when digital technology was not yet an existent medium, while Okiishi worked during a time in which the technological world and its social effects are central to his work and message. In fact, a central point of his work gesture/data is to replicate our dependent relationship with technology and how people interact with the virtual world. This world is only available by viewing through a screen; it is unreachable, unlike the tangible objects, that we can physically feel, via which Gonzalez-Torres’ works often confronted viewers. These two artists demonstrate stark, pivotal generational differences: a world and society before technology, art before digital technology (Gonzalez-Torres), and the effects and experiences of art in a world engulfed by such technology entirely (Okiishi). One relies on physical interaction, and the other responds and relays the effects of infinite, intangible spectacles. Both speak to the importance and meaning of presence, or being, and what part that presence or absence plays in art experience during these juxtaposing time periods: before and after the Internet. In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, French theorist Guy Debord wrote, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”.[1] Gonzalez-Torres’ and Okiishi’s artworks both could be said to exemplify this idea of evolution and generational transformation, but in Okiishi’s work, there is an increased disconnection, to the point that everything may be mere representation. This raises the question: has art changed with technology? Have we lost actual experience to mere representation? [1]Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Buchet-Chastel, 196

Modern ‘live’ football: moving from the panoptican gaze to the performative, virtual and carnivalesque

Drawing on Redhead's discussion of Baudrillard as a theorist of hyperreality, the paper considers the different ways in which the mediatized ‘live’ football spectacle is often modelled on the ‘live’ however eventually usurps the ‘live’ forms position in the cultural economy, thus beginning to replicate the mediatized ‘live’. The blurring of the ‘live’ and ‘real’ through an accelerated mediatization of football allows the formation of an imagined community mobilized by the working class whilst mediated through the sanitization, selling of ‘events’ and the middle classing of football, through the re-encoding of sporting spaces and strategic decision-making about broadcasting. A culture of pub supporting then allows potential for working-class supporters to remove themselves from the panoptican gazing systems of late modern hyperreal football stadia and into carnivalesque performative spaces, which in many cases are hyperreal and simulated themselves

The Media Trade in Virtual Design

As media attention has become a dominating force within the design economy, visibility became the combustible that fuels the current design industry. Designed objects were once real products, but are now often prototypes, props to be exhibited and photographed, whose role is to fill space in the media, raise the media profile of their creators and convey the name of brokers, sponsors and partners. As a result celebrated design objects are now rare pieces that are highly visible in the virtual media, while they are virtually absent from the conventional market. For industry, this trajectory of design makes them props to fill space in the media, raise the media profile of their creators and ‘brand’ the name of brokers, sponsors and partners. Today a designer has to be successful in the media in order to attract industry attention. This paper observes the way designers make virtue of their visibility in mediated contexts, thus redefining the industrial model of design practice. Simultaneously, the paper looks at the way the media makes use of its influence in a new virtual design context, producing informed speculations for the evolution of design activities. And in order to contextualize this evolution the paper follows a trajectory from the history of design to build a background to this foreground

Akram Khan re-writes ‘Radha’: The ‘hypervisible’ cultural identity in Kylie Minogue’s ‘Showgirl’

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19(1), 23 - 34, 2009 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07407700802655265.This paper attempts to analyze the British Asian dancer/choreographer Akram Khan's choreography of Samsara for Kylie Minogue's “homecoming” version of the 2006 Showgirl tour as an intellectual commentary on the 1906 American modern dance piece Radha by Ruth St Denis. On the surface Khan's choreography can be seen to reiterate some of the same Orientalist tropes that St Denis was accused of, within a popular “low”-culture context. Acknowledging this trope I scrutinize Khan's key choreographic strategies that challenge the potentially feminist reading of St Denis’ Radha by successfully reinstating the marriage plot within his choreography. More significantly, he makes “hypervisible,” the source culture of Kathak and the body of authority (himself) in the cultural exchange that shapes this choreographic project. Through an analysis of Khan's choreographic endeavor and a reevaluation of the power play between male and female bodies in the space, I wish to extrapolate Khan's intellectual vision within Samsara as an expression and assertion of the place of diasporic identity and cultural exchange within Western popular culture. I frame my paper within the preexistent frameworks from scholars like Sally Banes, Priya Srinivasan, Edward Said, Kobena Mercer, Rustom Bharucha and Philip Auslander

Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.Keywords: genomics, biodigital, bodies, spectacle, everyda

The threshold of the real: A site for participatory resistance in Blast Theory's Uncle Roy all around you (2003)

This article examines the collision of virtual and real spaces through simultaneous live and online play in Uncle Roy All Around You, and how this disruption of immersion is used to expose the habitual engagements associated with the digital interface. The nature of the participants' immersion and the subsequent reintegration into the real will be explored, before attempting to articulate what defines this piece as politically resistant, through discussion of a self reflexive participation, which undermines what Baudrillard terms the 'simulated response' (Baudrillard 1985/1988 p.216

Player identification in American McGee’s Alice : a comparative perspective

In this paper I analyse personal identification in three incarnations of Alice in Wonderland: the original novels, the 1950s Disney animation film and the computer game American McGee’s Alice. After presenting the research corpus, I lay out the analytical framework derived from Kendall Walton’s theory of representational artefacts as props for evoking imagining in games of make-believe. From this perspective, the Alice heritage relies on spectacle rather than plot to entertain. This spectacle differs across media as each medium’s strengths are played out: language-play in the novels, colour/motion/sound in the film and challenges in the game. There are two types of imagining involved: objective, whereby a person imagines a scene outside of himself, and subjective, in which case the imagining revolves around a version of himself. Both the novels and the film primarily evoke objective imagining whereas the game invites the player to be introjected into the Alice character evoking subjective imagining. The picture is not unambiguous, however, as the novels and the film stage a broad array of subjectifying techniques and the game objectifying ones. This gives us some indication as to the nature of representation which, to be of interest, presents a tension between here and there, between the self and an other

Afrocentric Ideologies and Gendered Resistance in Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X: Setting, Scene, and Spectatorship

This study of scenes from the films Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X, describes images of myth, gender, and resistance familiar to African-American interpretive communities. Key thematic and technical elements of these films are opposed to familiar Hollywood practices, indicating the directors\u27 effort to address resisting spectators. Both filmmakers, Julie Dash and Spike Lee respectively, chose subjects with an ideological resonance in African-American collective memory: Malcolm X, eulogized by Ossie Davis as our living black manhood (i) and the women of the Gullah Sea Islands, a site often celebrated for its authentically African cultural survivals. Both films combine images of an African past with an American present using a pattern of historically specific myths and tropes