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Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body By Celena E. Kusch
Speaking at the Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body, artist Stelarc discussed his robotic “Third Hand.” He designed the prosthetic device, which is controlled by muscle signals from other parts of his body, to demonstrate the role of the technological prosthetic as a “sign of excess, not lack.” He claimed that humans have always had a “prosthetic body” enhanced with tools, machines and other technologies to compensate for the body’s limitations. Dr. Yvonne Gaudelius, assistant professor of art education and women’s studies, and Dr. Charles Garoian, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art education, co-chaired Penn State’s second symposium on performance art. Stelarc (kneeling), senior research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, and four student volunteers model what Stelarc called the “involuntary body.” Here, Stelarc uses electrical stimuli to activate muscle reflexes in the volunteers’ arms. He embraces the connection between technology and the body in performance art, envisioning remote dancers that control half of each other’s bodies and a computer-generated avatar that stimulates muscle responses in a human in order to “walk in the real world.” During the Performative Sites symposium, Simon Penny, associate professor of art and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, challenged the intersection of technology and the body, saying, “If the tools we use for our art arise from a military logic which must insinuate itself into the machine, is it not possible that we are attempting to do cultural work with munitions? As we bend our methodology double to conform to the machine, shouldn’t we ask what conformations of these technologies can support our practices?”	Cyborgs, clones and robotic prostheses seem like the stuff of science fiction. But in recent years, an influx of technology into the realm of the body — with repaired, reconstructed and replaced joints and organs, for example, or through a range of new reproductive technologies — has called into question the gap between body and machine in virtually every aspect of our society.   Recognizing that we live in a culture that is increasingly dependent on technology, artists and cultural theorists have taken up these issues in order to examine the ways that technology and the body are conceived. Their work was the focus of a Penn State symposium called Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body.   A project two years in the making, the Performative Sites symposium drew more than 500 participants from the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and throughout Latin America. Penn State faculty members Dr. Charles Garoian, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art education, and Dr. Yvonne Gaudelius, assistant professor of art education and women’s studies, served as conference co-chairs. Together they created a forum for performance artists, theorists and students to explore the ways technology has an impact upon the body and its identity.   Many participants praised their efforts in creating a single space for the discussion of performance art. One participant explained that he had attended the first Penn State symposium on performance art four years ago and saw it as a wonderful way to overcome the isolation often felt in this field, particularly for scholars and artists working outside the major urban centers. He claimed it had energized him and renewed his enthusiasm for the work.   Garoian noted the importance of the symposium in his welcoming address.   “A number of artists are challenging the relationships between art, technology and the body,” he said, “and the questions they raise are fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be human in today’s world of medical, digital, machine and other technologies. The Penn State symposium will initiate the important cultural critiques that lead to understandings that will enable us to construct a cultural democracy.”   Gaudelius agreed, adding that, “As educators, these questions are important. Technology inspires both pleasure and terror. For example, the technologies of the mass media are a pleasure and an enjoyment but also strike terror when they are used for surveillance and control. Medical prosthetic devices are often seen as lifesaving, but they can also appear monstrous when used on a healthy body (whatever that is). Performance art enables us to examine our cultural assumptions of what it means to be human.”   Participants in the Performative Sites symposium examined the theoretical, experiential and pedagogical implications of performance artists’ works that use mechanical, electronic, robotic and bio-technologies. In its four-day program, the symposium included a performance series, lectures, workshops and panel discussions by more than 50 national and international performance artists, educators and leading cultural theorists, including Dr. N. Katherine Hayles of the University of California-Los Angeles, Dr. Peggy Phelan of New York University, Dr. Richard Coyne of the University of Edinburgh and independent scholar Dr. Maria Fernandez.   During the symposium, registered participants also had an opportunity to enjoy the works of a number of artists who were performing, presenting lectures or both. A series of evening performances open to the public attracted many members of the community, as well. The evening programs featured performances by nearly a dozen artists and groups. These included the two members of osseus labyrint, who performed suspended above the audience as they engaged in body contortions that evoke alien, nonhuman forms. In the Zoller Gallery of the School of Visual Arts, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes performed Aztechnology, an installation that examined and challenged the political and cultural stereotypes associated with Mexican/American identity.   Appropriately, the first symposium session was a performance and a manifesto. Robert Ayers, artistic director of the Bonington Gallery at Nottingham Trent University, performed his Transatlantic Low-Tech Manifesto, a multimedia combination of live and recorded readings and painting performances overlaid upon each other. The result was a striking commentary on the low-tech and, what Ayers called, the “visceral” aspects of performance art. One line of his manifesto stated, “I believe in performance ... that it exists before anyone arrives and after everyone has gone away again ... I believe in photographs and video ... and in photographs and video becoming the performance again ... But I also believe in recollection and profound effect and the lingering power of the performed moment ... .”   Goat Island, a performance group that employs elements of dance, drama, storytelling, seemed to share Ayers’ focus on the “low-tech” body as an element that should be preserved. Members of the group, including Lin Hixson, director, and performers Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffrey and Bryan Saner, presented a workshop for symposium participants and a public performance in the evening. Their performance, The Sea & Poison, used erratic and anxious body movements interwoven with text to tell stories about the residual effects of technology on the body and the natural environment.   In contrast to Ayers and Goat Island, Australian performance artist Stelarc embraced technology as a way to avoid reliance upon the body. According to Stelarc, senior research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, the notions of free will and awareness have been culturally tied to the body, so that we now falsely “fear the involuntary.” His performances use medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet to question the role of the body.   Working in technology labs, Stelarc has used electrodes on muscles to translate signals from the Internet into involuntary body movements. During his session, he discussed using similar technology to link remote dancers who would control half of each other’s bodies or developing computer avatars that could demonstrate emotion by stimulating facial expressions on a remote human body.   Stelarc asked symposium participants: “Can we construct a body that is hollow, obsolete, invaded and involuntary and still human? There are scary ways to think about this,” he added, “like implanting an 8-bit computer chip on a cockroach or fish to guide them and do surveillance. But there are also exciting possibilities for multiple agency with involuntary collaboration.”   Like Stelarc, Dr. Henry A. Giroux’s cultural theory presentation addressed a similar concern for balance between the modern and postmodern and between the desire for a stable identity and body and the embrace of the complexities of destabilization. Giroux, Penn State’s Waterbury Chair Professor and director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies, received a standing ovation during the symposium for his presentation titled “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy and the Politics of Masculine Violence.”   Simon Penny, associate professor of art and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, attempted to walk the line between human agency and technological control by creating what he called “embodiment-affirming technologies” through performance art. Examples of his works included robots that respond to natural body movements and intuitive and virtual reality immersion rooms, which people do not need to be trained to use and can experience immediately simply by moving their bodies.   Other presentations were concerned with the less mechanistic technologies that shape the body, including issues of race and gender presented through various technologies of artistic production. Dr. Roselyn Costantino, associate professor of Spanish and cultural studies at Penn State Altoona, focused on works by three Latina performance artists who create alternative technologies of representation that allow women greater cultural agency.   In the final sessions of the symposium, speakers and participants demonstrated their willingness for self-examination and critique, as well. During the session by Dr. Susan Squier, Julia Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Penn State, and Faith Wilding, research fellow of the Carnegie Mellon Studio for Creative Inquiry, Wilding staged an interruption designed to emphasize the need to question the art and theories presented throughout the symposium. The event involved a pretended protest against artificial reproductive technology (suggestively abbreviated ART). The discussion quickly moved into many of the questions about the integrity of the body and the ethics of technology raised by previous speakers.   Responding to provocative presentations by two archivists, the participants also discussed the impact of technology upon the “body” of work in the field of performance art. Barry Smith of the international Performance Arts Digital Research Unit stressed the need for digital records of the work, saying “archiving is about what counts for the next generation. We want there to be a trace.” Co-presenter Thomas Mulready, former director of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, turned his attention to the dramatic tension between the loss of recorded performances and the enormous amount of resources needed to preserve those technology-based records. Mulready staged a performance of a fundraising meeting with one-of-a-kind videotapes held as ransom. He questioned whether it would be better to fund the development of new performances than to create and maintain archives of past works that were designed to be transient and visceral. While most participants spoke ardently about the historical and pedagogical value of such records, none could offer a solution to the funding needs. “It’s a problem created by the technology,” noted symposium participant Michael J. Herbst of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival.   Such discussions were also part of the educational experience for student participants in the symposium. As a part of the program, many students enrolled in a 1-credit course that included symposium sessions, evening performances and daily student breakout discussions. In these meetings, students from schools throughout the nation discussed the day’s presentations, created a performance score and completed short performances for the group. Penn State graduate students Angela Ellsworth and Tina Takemoto led the student sessions.   The Performative Sites symposium was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Fifteen Penn State colleges, schools and departments co-sponsored the event, including the College of Arts and Architecture, the College of the Liberal Arts, the College of Education, the College of Health and Human Development and the Division of Continuing Education through its Program Innovation Fund. The symposium was endorsed by Performance Studies International, the Center for Performance Research at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, Wales, and Franklin Furnace, the preeminent performance art archive in New York. Symposium events were recorded by the Digital Performance Archive and by students in Penn State’s Department of Film and Video, who are producing a documentary film about it. An outreach program of the College of Arts and Architecture, College of the Liberal Arts, College of Education and College of Health and Human Development