The normalization of the cyborg: from futuristic artistic expression of mutilation to daily aesthetic beauty

The concept of mutilation as a permanent scarring of the integrity of the body has been overcome by the representation in visual culture of the cyborg, the bionic human and the genetically and bionically engineered mutant. Mutants with bionic prosthetics in the X-Men film trilogy, the bionic man in The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and his companion The Bionic Woman (1976) as well as The Terminator (1984) with its sequels have contributed to create a new aesthetic perception of the artificial. From the Cyborg Manifesto to theories of Post-humanism and Trans-humanism, the arts have embraced the opportunity of realizing the conjunction between human and machine envisaged at first by Tommaso Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto. Stelarc has contributed with his performances and body implants to explore new aesthetic forms that conceive the prosthesis as an evolutionary empowering design. If in the arts this approach has created aesthetic debates and polarizations between bioconservatism and technoprogressivism, how is the reality of mutilation approached by people in their daily lives? The paper analyzes whether the aesthetic perception of prosthetics is that of a permanent sign of mutilation or that of a new technological empowerment. “In the last two to three years many men have asked to have prosthetics without coverage, leaving the metal part visible. They tell me that a leg like this is more futuristic! Maybe they feel more masculine because the metallic leg gives them the sensation of being bionic, half human and half machine. Men under fifty especially request it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, women ask for symmetric prosthetics very similar to the one they lost.” Interview with Dr. X at the Limb Fitting Centre, London. If the visual arts have created an experience and imagination of post-humanity as the futuristic merging of human and machine that the public perceives as increasingly achievable, what are the new frontiers of aesthetic exploration? Are the aesthetics of post-humanity becoming those of a ‘normalization’ of cyborgology? The paper will argue that the contemporary aesthetics of futuristic empowerment look to artists and designers in order to deliver new modes of aesthetic consumption for a technology no longer perceived as reconstruction of a mutilation but as the empowering necessary framework to facilitate the transition from human to super-human

European Avant-Garde: Art, Borders and Culture in Relationship to Mainstream Cinema and New Media

This research analyses the impact of transformation and hybridization processes at the intersection of art, science and technology. These forms of transformation and hybridization are the result of contemporary interactions between classic and digital media. It discusses the concept of 'remediation' presented by Bolter and proposes the concept of 'digital ekphrasis,' which is based on Manovich' s analyses of the interactions between classic and digital media. This is a model which, borrowed from semiotic structures, encompasses the technical as well as aesthetic and philosophical transformations of contemporary media. The thesis rejects Baudrillard's and Virilio's proposed concepts of 'digital black hole' as the only possible form of evolution of contemporary digital media. It proposes a different concept for the evolutionary model of contemporary hybridization processes based on contemporary forms of hybridizations that are rooted in aesthetic, philosophical and technological developments. This concept is argued as emancipated from the 'religious' idea of a 'divine originated' perfect image that Baudrillard and Virilio consider to be deteriorated from contemporary hybridization experimentation. The thesis proposes, through historical examples in the fine arts, the importance of transmedia migrations and experimentations as the framework for a philosophical, aesthetic and technological evolutionary concept of humanity freed from the restrictions of religious imperatives

Watermans International Festival of Digital Art, 2012

Touch and Go is a title that I chose together with Irini Papadimitriou for this lea special issue. On my part with this title I wanted to stress several aspects that characterize that branch of contemporary art in love with interaction, be it delivered by allowing the audience to touch the art object or by becoming part of a complex electronic sensory experience in which the artwork may somehow respond and touch back in return.With the above statement, I wanted to deliberately avoid the terminology ”˜interactive art’ in order to not fall in the trap of characterizing art that has an element of interaction as principally defined by the word interactive; as if this were the only way to describe contemporary art that elicits interactions and responses between the artist, the audience and the art objects

The Physical and Virtual Structures of the Landscapes of Contemporary Art

As the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) I am pleased to present our first catalog born from a collaboration between LEA, Sabanci University, Kasa Gallery and Goldsmiths, University of London

Red art: new utopias in data capitalism

The publication investigates the relevance of socialist utopianism to the current dispositions of new media art, through the contributions of renowned and emerging academic researchers, critical theorists, curators and artists. From the early stages of its development, new media art readily adopted a variety of means of artistic engagement and expression that aim at serving modes of utopian social being: from multi-modal collaboration to unrestricted public participation and from open software applications to hacktivism, the germs of leftist political thought seem to abound in the art of the digital age. Prompted by the economic crisis, new media art appears to increasingly employ the tools provided by new technologies in order to penetrate all aspects of global social living and assert the need for socioeconomic change. New media artworks and art projects have gradually formed a common practice whose objectives allude to utopian theories of social organization lying closer to certain visions of communism, direct democracy and anarchism, rather than to the realities of neoliberal capitalism within which new media are produced and predominantly operate. "Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism" explores this multifaceted context in an attempt to demystify whether and to what extent the art of the digital age could be the result of the seemingly paradox combination of capitalism's products and communism's visions

Explorations, structures, observations, analyses, canons: who can say that contemporary art is all about unchecked freedoms?

The article will analyze the artistic practice of two artists –Jane Prophet and Paul Catanese– within the context of contemporary art at the intersection of new media, science and technology. The construct that contemporary art is all about unchecked creativity and freedom is an inheritance of romantic ideas that are inspired by the ‘genius’ of creation and are based on the rejection of previous centuries’ aesthetic forms, structures and skills. By retracing the concept of Genius to Kant it is possible to see that in the philosopher’s analysis of the relationship between art and genius, the latter is able to create art because of the rules bestowed upon him by Nature. The current ‘ideological aesthetic conflict’2 between David Hockney and Damien Hirst on the modalities of production is a reflection of two opposite approaches where one focuses on skills formed through canons, structures, observation and repetitions while the other adopts forms of production in the construction of the poetic that are based on post industrial relationships –the artworks are physically done by someone else and the artist limits his contribution to selection and branding of the chosen pieces with his signature. The exhibition E-scapes: Artistic Explorations of Nature and Science at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, co-curated by myself and Vince Dziekan, presents the work of Prophet and Catanese in this larger context and analyzes two different approaches that are rooted in an artistic practice that reflects canons, methodologies and approaches typical of skill based aesthetics

Culturally transplanted and displaced: the geographies of re-production of space and identity

The paper will address the issues of geographical transplantation, displacement and the re-shaping of both space and identities beyond the limitations of national and cultural boundaries. The context of the paper will be the city of Istanbul where the body and its representation is charged with historical, cultural, social and political boundaries as well as geographical and physical signifiers. The body in this context becomes a contexted territory - as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio write - where physical and geographical borders are redefined, assimilated and/or rejected. By focusing on contemporary Istanbul, the article will analyze the contradictions of a body transplanted from the West into the East and the difficulties in the re-production of spaces and identities that are characterized by absolute definitions that offer only strategies of assimilation or rejection, destruction or preservation