The Dance of The Body without Organs Essay -- Electronics Essays

The Dance of The Body without Organs My current project employs the concept of the Body w/o Organs as a model of artistic process to undermine social, scientific, and political hierarchies used in organizing our states of consciousness and embodiment. By arriving at a location of stillness, or â€Å"zero intensity† through this process of dislocating normative structures; new structures, configurations, and organizations will emerge that reflect local, emotional, or irrational consistencies. The project exists in several instantiations, including immersive virtual environments, networked art, 3-D modeling, and texts. Body w/o Organs, Deleuze and Guattari, Artaud, Virtual Reality, Virtual Environment, Irrationality, Surrealism, Visible Human Project 1.0 Situating Subjectivity â€Å"My mind became a place of refuge, an sanctuary, a room I could enter with no fear of invasion. My mind became a site of resistance.† (hooks, 1991) Located as a privileged subject relative to race and gender; I am at a transitional place regarding power relations. My upbringing as a white male of a middle class family in a line of Scottish farmers immigrating to the rural Midwestern US roots me in the blood-soaked soil of the Klu Klux Klan. I was born and raised 20 years after and 30 miles from Marion, Indiana, site of countless barbaric lynchings of African Americans. My sympathies betrayed the hegemonic classifications of my own body and color of flesh. I lined up with the victims, not with my kin. My desire to be done with the coding of the politics of identity in my flesh increased my sense of disembodiment. My own betrayal of skin and kin accompanied by the undeniable privilege afforded me by the embodied coding of race has created a ... ...cal and theoretical issues related to the technologies of immersive virtual reality, netart, and avatars; specifically with respect to issues of identity, embodiment, and human sentience. He has presented and exhibited his work in numerous international venues, including Ars Electronica, Invencao, Consciousness Reframed, Webs of Discourse, CADE, as well as museums, galleries, and alternative spaces. His essay, â€Å"A Manifesto for Avatars† was published in Intertexts in 1998. At present he is a visiting researcher at the Virtual Reality Centre at the University of Teesside, and at the CAVE Lab, New Media Center, The University of Michigan. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Art/New Media at Bowling Green State University, and an Assistant Professor of Art at Kent State University. http://www.stark.kent.edu/~glittle http://www.oberlin.net/~glittle