Sculpture as deconstruction: The aesthetic practice of Ron Mueck

This article analyses recent (2009) work of Australian-born, British-based hyperrealist sculptor, Ron Mueck, in order to show how it not only engages with a range of specific contemporary concerns and debates, but also operates as a visual deconstruction of Cartesian subjectivity. In order to identify Mueck's deconstructive practice, the article uses a combination of multimodal, sensory and discourse analyses to situate Mueck's work discursively and institutionally, and to explore the ways in which it provokes reader engagement. As the author identifies, each of the works - Youth, Still life and Drift - addresses specific issues and they all provoke a self-reflexive engagement that brings together all aspects of viewer engagement (sensory, emotional, intellectual, spiritual), challenging the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes the Cartesian subject. © The Author(s), 2012

Is data a toaster? Gender, sex, sexuality and robots

© 2016, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved. This article considers the development of robotics through the lens of Gender Studies, with a particular interest in exploring relationships of intimacy involving robots. The production of sex robots has prompted some ethicists to set up the Campaign Against Sex Robots, their position articulated in Kathleen Richardson’s, 2015 paper, “The Asymmetrical ‘Relationship’: Parallels Between Prostitution and the Development of Sex Robots”. It is notable that these sex robots are commonly referred to as sexbots or fembots, but there is seldom reference to a malebot, though makers suggest that they can or will be made. Others (notably the makers) see this technology as no different from a vibrator or dildo and suggest that it could be a way of dealing with aberrant and criminal sexual behaviours including paedophilia. Intimacy is more than sexual practice, of course, and the ability of humans to form emotional attachments to technology is well-documented. Consider, for example, Maja Mataric’s description of the relationships formed by families with their Roomba vacuum cleaner in the Robotics Primer (2007). This led to problems for the makers for whom it was less expensive to replace a broken machine than to fix it, but who were faced with demands from families that their Roomba be repaired and returned to them. This article addresses this debate, exploring a range of contributions from ethicists, roboticists, gender theorists and others, and making specific reference to the television programs, the Scandinavian series, Real Humans (2012) and its English version, Humans (2015), as well as to Jordan Wolfson’s recent artwork, Female Figure (2014). This article is published as part of a collection on gender studies

Ecce techno, or, suiting the biomechanical platform: Immersion and contemporary embodiment

This article examines what happens in the experience of embodiment when a person is immersed or clad in technologies designed to redefine the edges and to extend the communicative capabilities of each individual body. The article also analyses how multisensory communications technology is currently challenging contemporary definitions of gender, community and technology. © 2007, Sage Publications. All rights reserved

Fabric(ated) Ontologies: the biopolitics of smart design in clothing and jewellery

This paper exploresthe biopotiticsof smaf design as it is realised in contemporary smart clothing and jewellery. The discussion hinges on our understanding of the meanings of technology and of the relationship between technology and human ontology, i.e. human being. \f begins by exploring the assumed relationship between clothing and skin - that clothing is a form of skin, a second skin - which leads us fo explore the ways in which skin operates as a technology. My argument is that skin is not a form of technology, and that making fhis assumption leads to a re-invocation of the mind-body split, which makes human subjects susceptible to ordering by their own technology. lnstead the paper argues for recognition of clothing (and jewellery) as technology, and the examination of wearables as a more technical form of an existing technology. This enables us fo explore the ways in which human being is modified and transformed by this new technology and to choose applications that enhance the potential of individual subjects

Sonic Assault to Massive Attack: touch, sound and embodiment

In Dorothy L. Sayers novel, The Nine Tailors (2003)the man whose death is being investigated by Lord Peter Wimsey is killed by sound. Accidentally locked in a church bell-chamber during a celebration New Years change-ring of fifteen thousand, eight hundred and forty Kent Treble Bob Majors (p. 12), the man dies in agony under the sonic assault of nine huge bells. Wimsey realizes what has caused the mans death when he finds himself in the bell-chamber during a short emergency peal and suffers a breakdown. Sayers description of the dead man makes it clear how traumatic his death has been, as Jim Thoday who discovered the body recounts

The Ghost In/On The Machine: Magic, Technology And The "Modest Witness"

In her essay, "Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium" Donna Haraway writes about the ?modest witness?, the scientific observer whose disinterested observation of phenomena is central to the scientific method. Haraway deconstructs the meaning of 'modesty' in this context and then situates the practice of the 'modest witness' socially and culturally: This self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. This is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. This kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity. This is the virtue that guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment. (Haraway, 1997: 23-24

Semefulness: A social semiotics of touch

This paper explores the multiple significances (semefulness) of touch, as experienced by us as embodied subjects. Prompted by the development of a range of touch-based technologies, I consider the current writings about touch in a range of fields and how these have contributed to contemporary understandings of the meanings of touch. I then explore a number of these meanings - connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation, positioning - for their contribution to our understanding of the world and of our own embodied subjectivity. I also explore the deployment of these meanings by contemporary technologies. © 2011 Taylor & Francis

Mediating human-technology relationships: explorations of hybridity, humanity and embodiment in Doctor Who

The relationship between human beings and technology has been a regular concern of the television series, Doctor Who. Though its titular hero moves through space-time by means of advanced technology and he is by his own admission a technological genius and Doctor `of everything really, the program nevertheless consistently maps the unease that attends the interaction of humans and the technology whether through the human characters horror at the abuse of technology and its power or through characters who incorporate this interactio

From extension to engagement: Mapping the imaginary of wearable technology

This article maps the metaphors that have been used to facilitate human engagement with wearable technologies - extension, enhancement, augmentation - and locates the values and assumptions about the body and technology that they articulate. At the same time it considers the figure of the cyborg, in which many of these metaphors are incorporated fictionally and theoretically, and locates in this figure not one (interrogative, critical) meaning, but many possible meanings. The article then goes on to explore a recent reconfiguring of the human-technology relationship (Schroeder and Rebelo's 2007 analogy with the relationship between musician and intstrument), which it describes in terms of engagement - and to propose further that we need to embrace fully the embodied character of this relationship in order to realize the most creative possibilities of our relationship with the material world as expressed in this recent technology. © 2008 SAGE Publications

Touching film: the practice politics of viewing and

This article analyses the experiences of film-viewing and making by reference to the sense of. For viewers the tactility of film is in the film's deployment of sound in the ways it challenges the viewer's sense; that is, sense of in space. Both, it is argued, are to incorporate the viewer into the 's narrative and its politics, as classical film is often said to "suture" the into both the narrative and politics the text. In contrast, the article also the work of a filmmaker, Stefan, who specifically works against "suturing" effect, in order to enhance viewer's own agency in generating in a film. Popescu follows avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage in physically his films-touching them in a variety ways (scratching, cutting, burning the film stock) in order to disrupt realist viewing practice and its politics. © BERG 2009