THE TECHNICAL FACTOR
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Gert Balling
The human being, half a century seen through the body
ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst
2000
Interest in the body really began to develop when Dolly, the cloned sheep, saw the light of day. Since then, biotechnological visions of the future have been a permanent feature in all the media. And not only visions of the future. More and more people have artificial replacements of parts of the body: hips, knees, artificial blood vessels, hearing aids, pacemakers, cranium plates, artificial spare parts of the ear, muscles and tendons, artificial skin cultures and organs of organic or non-organic material. It is therefore no longer obvious what is natural and what is artificial - where the body begins and where it ends.
The concepts of natural and artificial are normally associated with the values of good and bad. This distinction is blurred when artificial matter is implanted in the body. With the abolition of the contrasts between natural and artificial, the opposition between man and machine also disappears. Man and machine are fused. This is seen in concepts such as biotechnology, gene technology, genetic codes, artificial intelligence and so on.
To the world at large, the technical development in the form of gene therapy and cloning is all that matters today. To the individual, what matters is finding new points of reference, that can define the nature of human existence. This is one of the points of this exhibition, and at the same time it is what fascinates the artists included in this article. They are Nancy Burson and Keith Cottingham, who work with computer manipulation, and "the living work of art" Stelarc, who is physically integrated in a man-machine installation.
The three artists all include the human body in their works and have a very direct approach to the abolition of the difference between natural and artificial, or rather - address the consequences of technology insinuating itself into the human body. Before considering the individual artists, a description is given of the disappearance of the representation of reality in the information society, as well as an account of the bearing modern technology has - in the form of the computer - on the artistic analysis of this reality. The computer as a special way of understanding the world and man, i.e. as a system that can be decoded and given the shape of digital signals, will also be dealt with.
The Reality-Manipulating Computer
Before computer manipulation became possible, the photograph was regarded as incontrovertible evidence - a mechanical documentation of reality. Therefore, photography was used for visa and passports, documentaries and press photos, the prime task of which was to provide evidence of reality. Private pictures became proof of man's identity, and public images were signs of a common cultural memory, which one was acquainted with through technical reproduction and the circulation of information which followed from that.
In the electronic mass media of today, the form of the photograph has changed from being analogous to being digital. The digitalised picture, in contrast to the analogue photograph, is dissolved into elements (pixels), which can be manipulated individually, thus making it impossible to trace any manipulation. In this way the truth-value of the photograph is abolished. Through the new digital technology, the idea of the photograph as a reflection of reality is eliminated. Instead, we have a picture which may be manipulated and which does not necessarily refer to any truly existing reality.
Altogether, the idea of representing reality becomes problematic in the digital age. The rapid growth of the information society means that much of our knowledge of the world is distributed via the electronic media. Never before have we had a world with so many signs, which have so nearly been reduced to empty forms. The signs are sucked into the accelerating circulation of information, and mimic or simulate the value systems and composite meanings of former times, but they are devoid of meaning. We use the signs, but they have lost their content.
As a delicate sensor for changes in society, the digital art photograph of today registers the new ways of making pictures, which are characteristic of the post-modern information society of today. In a very direct way the digital and computer manipulated photograph abolishes the authenticity of the picture or representation. It refers to itself as a sign which, rather than miming reality, constructs new realities. In this way the digitally manipulated art photograph points to the fictitious nature of the photograph, all the while including modern technology in the form of the computer as a "natural" part of the way the modern world understands itself.
The increased use of computers in art photography is an interesting tendency in relation to the way the human body is depicted in art. On the one hand it is a manifestation of the awareness that our perspective of the world is constructed. On the other hand the artist's use of computer manipulation in cases where the body is manipulated through the computer, e.g. in the form of a clone, is a comment on this "constructed" body - on man seen in a technological perspective. In these cases artists use contemporary technology to explore the ways contemporary technology influences our understanding of ourselves.
Man Seen Through the Mirror of Technology
Whereas art uses the computer to edit the image of reality in such a way that the construction behind visible reality is laid bare, technologists use the computer to expose the truth behind biological reality.
In as early as the 17th century, scientists deliberately tried to imitate man mechanically in order, so to speak, to force nature to release its secrets. A wonderful example of this is the robot builder, Jacques de Vaucanson, who created the life-size figure of The Flute Player in 1738. With his mechanical flute-playing doll, he thought that he had recreated the functioning of man mechanically. This idea was supported by the contemporary philosopher and doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who only regretted that Vaucanson had not spent his time making it speak instead!
There are countless examples of this mechanical understanding of the world. The idea of creating Artificial Intelligence by technical means is an example from our time. When the computer was introduced in 1940, it was compared to the human brain right from the beginning. And at the illustrious American University of MIT, the legendary scientist Marvin Minsky has long compared the operations of the human brain to that which can be simulated in a computer. In so doing, Minsky postulates that all brain-based processes can be translated into computer programmes.
But why, in a technological perspective, is man such an interesting topic, when it seems that we have held this view since the 17th century? This is especially due to the fact that biology has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. Formerly, the domain of biology was a description of species and their origin. However, two events have changed this radically: the patenting of life in 1987 and the cloning of human embryos in 1993. These two events are milestones in the recent history of biology. The biological experiments of the 1980's and 1990's were directed at optimising man's genetic heritage, which on the one hand made a real production of copies possible and on the other opened up for a development of specific characteristics. The development within biology is related to the understanding within information science of man as a kind of computer. This is seen e.g. in Minsky's claim that man can be understood as an information structure. When man is inscribed in the concepts of information theory as a programmable information pattern, man as a whole disappears. Jerry Hall, who is both a researcher into genes, and head of the Washington University Clinic Laboratory, where human embryos were cloned in 1993, regards the successful experiments of the Laboratory as evidence that it is possible to produce genetically identical copies, e.g. in the form of embryos, which can function as test models, safety copies or stores for spare parts.
In this biotechnological perspective, man as a unique individual and unique specimen disappears. Instead it is now the inherited genetic code which is regarded as unique, and thus inviolable. This means that man enters into a relationship of resources, as a collection of individual elements or processes. As resource there is no difference in principle between the technically artificial and organically natural. In other words, the difference between the constructed and living life is abolished. In this perspective, life is not present as a whole in an inviolable individual; life functions according to a more mechanically rational logic. And the conclusion is very interesting, because it is no longer about wanting to imitate the technological wonders of nature (as did Vaucanson, the robot builder), but on the contrary about recreating the nature of man according to our technological insights. This is something entirely different and rather new.
Digital Clones in Art: Nancy Burson and Keith Cottingham
In the following, we shall try to see how these artists depict constructed man through modern technology. Nancy Burson does it by means of the portrait, but not portraits of real people. She works with fictitious people created via a computer-generated fusion of the features of several people. Technically, the tones of the horizontal picture have been translated into pixels, after which the computer has made its calculations and "given birth to" this picture of a clone. Burson's series of portraits consist i.e. of portraits of time specific types, the so-called First and Second Beauty Composites, where the contemporary ideals of beauty are compared with those of the 1950's and with recognizable clones of the power elite with negatively charged titles such as Big Brother or Warhead. Here features from dictators or leaders of the superpowers of today are recognizable. What is probably her best known picture, the photograph Mankind, shows us the "citizen of the world" - i.e. the computer-generated average human, calculated on the basis of the demographic statistics of the world. Burson's photographs, in other words, are not real portraits, but fictitious average people expressed through the form of the portrait.
Nancy Burson's portraits do not depict individuals but types. In the typical classical portrait from the Renaissance, the artist depicted certain types with a background setting of external characteristics such as furniture, clothes, etc., indicating the person's social rank. Burson, on the other hand, defines the type through the external personal features of the individual as in Big Brother, where dictatorial features are cloned, thus producing a prototype dictator. But does this imply that Burson regards this description of types as being in some way meaningful - in that the exterior of a person reflects features of his character, as the Nazis believed? Or is it all just a post-modern game of quotations, where one is posed to guess what features are derived from whom?
Through the very clear constructions of statistical portraits in the computer-manipulated photographs, Burson confronts the myth of the photograph. On the one hand she keeps the categorizing function of the photograph, but on the other she distances herself from the photograph as documentation of the reality depicted in it. Burson's statistically calculated portraits draw attention to the photograph as a construct. Digital clones are calculated human beings whose individuality is created on the basis of an individual code at pixel level. In this way, via clear manipulations of the portraits, Burson uses the computer to expose a way of reading man, i.e. as the information structure mentioned above.
Also the artist Keith Cottingham takes the portrait as his point of departure. In his series Fictitious Portraits (1992), one sees what looks like a classical arrangement with a half-length portrait of a boy against a black background. The three photographs in the series are called Untitled (Single), Untitled (Double) and Untitled (Triple) and respectively show one, two, and three by and large identical boys. Cottingham has no real persons as models for the portrait, but has constructed a person on the basis of a combination of himself, drawings, and pictures of different races, ages and sexes, together with figures of clay.
These boy figures, then, are fictitious. They are depicted without any individual features: naked in front of a black background. The figures appear with no historical background in an empty space created by Cottingham himself who, god-like, has created a prototype which is partly based on figures of clay. A prototype, like Burson's Mankind, that combines the entire world into one creation, here with predominantly European features. But not only is there no background setting, the figures are multiplied on the basis of the same form. They constitute a unique specimen and are not part of a heterogeneous unity, they each constitute a unity in themselves.
But what are we to call this figure of a boy? What we see is undoubtedly a creature, which, looked at from a genetic point of view, resembles a human being. This creature cannot be called a clone, for that would presuppose an original to clone from. Thus it is an artificial, fictitious human being, who both is and is not a copy of us. Cottingham's prototype is a parallel to us - it is virtually like man, a simulation.
The difference between a person and a simulation is that the person has substance in the shape of a self, which provides a possibility for continuity and individual, human personality. The portrait as we know it from recent times is a documentation of this substance, a documentation of an awareness of consciousness itself - i.e. what is human.
Here Cottingham stabs rather than pinpoints the function of the portrait. For the painted or photographed portraits on the drawing-room wall and school photographs placed on the sideboards and pianos of grannies, uncles and aunts are documentation. They are memories I can relate to and which are exclusively my own. The portrait is my history or the trace of history which creates coherence in an incoherent world. But in Cottingham's boy figure there is no trace of memory or history. The figure is nothing - it is a simulation created on the basis of pixels. If you look more closely at this figure, you will see its lifelessness, its rigidity and the empty expression in its eyes. Has something been lost in translation? Translated he certainly is, digitalised all the way through, and even if he is not derived from an original, he can himself be multiplied, but none of the figures multiplied in the photographs seem to derive much pleasure from this fact.
As far as I can see, Cottingham's computer-manipulated photos of pseudo-humans are therefore not a comment on cloning as such, but rather on the perception of man seemingly associated with cloning. Here digitalisation is exposed as the new way of creating coherence, a new absolute.
Man- Machine: The Artist Stelarc
In contrast to Burson and Cottingham, Stelarc is his own work of art, in the same way as the artist Orlan. Nonetheless he deals with the same questions as Burson and Cottingham. Stelarc appears as a performance artist in a spectacular staging, where he is directly plugged into electronic equipment by means of electric cables. Through electrodes fastened to his muscles, Stelarc receives sequences of shocks, which make his body perform grotesque patterns of movement. In the video and performance The Third Hand Stelarc has been equipped with a third hand. This hand of course is artificial and connected with his own arm by means of electrodes, and is thus automatically directed by the natural movements of his arm, which again are directed by computer-generated electric shocks.
Stelarc very clearly shows the body as an information structure: we follow in detail how electric impulses force his body to react in specific ways - as a grotesque updating of Luigi Galvani's scientific experiments with the muscles of frogs' legs and electricity at the end of the 18th century. But here in a remotely controlled model, where Stelarc takes Burson's and Cottingham's computer-manipulated body and makes it a reality.
Stelarc's scenario of the future is both a modern Gesamtkunstwerk and an electronic horror show. This is partly due to his use of old-fashioned technology in his artistically staged scenarios. Stelarc shows this by means of primitive, thick cables which connect him with a control panel, video and computer. Thus the scenario is on the one hand related to the future, but at the same time characterized by an aesthetics of decay and disintegration. In this way Stelarc stages a hopeless image of the future, building on an aesthetics which can be traced back to the laboratories of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis or James Whale's Frankenstein. Stelarc is a freak show, and the audience is both delighted and horrified at the grotesque man-machine, who is given up to complete technical compatibility and apparently deprived of his free will.
Stelarc epitomises the cyborg, which lexically is a combination of man and machine. The cyborg is a concrete expression of man read through the technically oriented conceptual apparatus of information theory as a kind of programmable information pattern. Its basis is the fusion of organic, natural man and artificial technology. The idea of the cyborg is derived from cybernetics and was developed within the framework of NASA in 1960, based on the theory that it was possible to "recode" man so that he was able to live in other environments than that of the atmosphere. Positively seen, then, the cyborg is an expression of man's ability to survive through technology, and negatively it is an expression of a reductionist view of man in our constrained compatibility with technology.
Stelarc does not support this myth of man as the controlling subject dominating technology. But still, all the time he mercilessly harmonises the means in his performance. He is never completely at the mercy of technology, which is why technology is shown as a forceful tool controlled by Stelarc. In this way, he depicts technology both as our deadly enemy and as the source of our being.
Through manipulation of the body, Burson, Cottingham and Stelarc show the importance of technology for man. When the difference between what is natural and what is artificial is blurred, the values attached to the natural/good on the one hand and the artificial/bad on the other also disappear. That is the reason why the organic-natural has become compatible with the technical-artificial. The cyborg body is a construct, no matter whether it is an organic body with a technical prosthesis, an organic body with an organic prosthesis, or a clone with or without manipulated genes. This undefinable body on the one hand forces us to find new points of orientation on which to base our understanding of ourselves, and on the other provides the very basis for the compatibility between the natural and the artificial in an all-embracing system, the digital.
Nancy Burson's comparison of computer and gene manipulation is a critical contribution to the on-going debate on gene technology and cloning. Her works are a protest against a view of man, according to which inherited qualities are seen as decisive for man's character and abilities. This perspective is exposed by Burson as debasing the subject and therefore ethically unacceptable. Keith Cottingham brings into focus digitalization as a possible, albeit reductive, system for understanding the world. “Translatable man" is only shown as a simulation of something human, which could be interpreted as follows: if we are made translatable it means we are no longer human. With his spectacular eye-opening performances, Stelarc shows that he neither subscribes to the fascination with technology nor with technophobia. He shows us an alien world, in which we already seem to belong, and which we are therefore forced to reflect on.
Man has survived many of the challenges of nature by virtue of the rationality of technology. It is a victory that has entailed costs. Although technology in many ways has developed the abilities and the scope of the body, technology also limits us. It limits us to thinking within a specific perspective, which over the years has increasingly reduced the distance between man and machine to such a degree that today the machine may be implemented in man or vice versa on the basis of a common denominator, which can be digitalized. Biotechnology is therefore not just a branch of science, it is also a view of man which is basically open to debate - above all in art.
KEITH COTTINGHAM. UNTITLED (TWINS), FROM THE SERIES FICTITIOUS PORTRAITS, 1992. DIGITALLY CONSTRUCTED PHOTOGRAPH, 46 X 38 INCHES. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
