Hansen & Munster

Both of our readings for this week take up issues surrounding technology and embodiment. Hansen and Munster both seem to be reacting against assumptions and practices that attempt to cut the body out of digital media. While Hansen's project takes this up by detailing radical works of digital art that reconceptualize the relationship between the body and technology, Munster's work seems to take up issues of technology and embodiment from a slightly different angle by re-thinking the goals of projects like Hansen's and pushes at the ethical implications of such projects.

What is at the heart of each of these projects seems to resemble many of the readings we've seen before. Hansen and Munster seem to take up the project of technologies and bodies to think through what potential these have for social transformation. Hansen's text seems fundamentally more hopeful to me than Munster's in that he organizes his text primarily through examples of artists attempting to do this work (his extended introduction of Kruger's work, for instance). Hansen seems to be suggesting that by focusing our attention on only the visual (3-D graphics) as a means for creating digital spaces, we are losing some of the most important potential that technology has to offer us: a space to re-work and re-mediate our own bodies in participatory ways that challenge passivity. For example, Hansen focuses on how Krueger's work allows the participants to take on some of the "programming" that might traditionally done by the "artist" by being responsible for the "input" in these virtual spaces that reconstruct the body and having the "output" speak to all of our senses. What results, then, from Hansen's work is something like what Dan Cameron refers to when describing these pieces as "a new category of beauty" (37). This new beauty is created through a new kind of awareness that is born from pairing body and technology in the ways Krueger (and others) accomplish.

This is where I see a nice link to the Munster text, which seems to nuance some of the claims made in Hansen a bit more. Although Munster also focuses on the necessity of bodily inclusion in the consideration of what she terms an "information aesthetic," she seems to consider some of the implications for the claims like those present present in Hansen. For example, in Chapter 5 Munster provides a complicated version of the "digital divide" argument questioning the place of new media in creating a more participatory space. Here, Munster detail the concept of the ethico-aesthetic which allows us to ask questions about what kinds of connectivity and social relationships are formed through certain texts. Munster points out here that although bodies (and art) are re-configured through new media, these reconfigurations or remediations do not promise or guarantee social trasformation; yet, there is certainly some potential for this. I appreciated this point in Munster because it reigns in the claims about "new potential" in some of the texts that we've read that often leave me skeptical.

Ah, there is so much more I want to write about here. But I need to save some time today to keep working on my final project. Here are some terms/concepts/ideas that I've found interesting that I'd like to talk more about in class if there is time:

-I'd be interested in talking about Hansen's description of the subject and individual on page 85 (especially in terms of how this paragraph pulls us in a different direction than how we've previously discussed these terms)

-I'm also interested in discussing Hansen's term "intercorporeity" in terms of how this allows us to move away from the notion of a body, one body that has been so consistently present throughout our readings

-Lastly, I'd be interested in talking more about Munster's ethico-aesthetic and what this might mean for relational art, performance, or some of the art Hansen described

That's all. For now, anyway...