My art professor in college just directed me toward this interview with artist Steve Seeley, in which the interviewer describes Seeley’s work as:

figurative work [that] often features the juxtaposition of human bodies and animal limbs, or heads. Sometimes alien parts make an appearance as well. He integrates old and new surfaces, incorporating the nostalgia of his childhood into a present assemblage… Seeley’s icons adopt the iconography of saints and superheros with all of the mystical proportions childhood bears with them. To re-erect and reexamine the Gods of childhood in effort, perhaps, to examine those ancient power structures. In Seeley’s case, they often become hybrid.

I looked through Seeley’s work and found it timely and illustrative for our being in between thinking about hacking and thinking about the monster. The following photo-examples I pulled from Seeley’s Delicate Matter:

Though the superhero imagery certainly resonates with a particular nostalgic part of me, it is the two “Icons” that I’ve been coming back to all morning. In a recent tweet, I suggested that the monster essentially is an uncanny subversion of nature, and that we come to fear these monsters out of a deep cognitive dissonance that begins with (is triggered by) their altered appearance, but quickly moves into something much more substantial (and permanent) when we become aware of the fact that the unseen characteristics, and thus the very nature of, the monster must have been altered too. To then make the monster a holy monster is to redefine one’s relationship with the Uncanny from one based in Fear of the Monster to one based in Reverence for the Sublime.

That Seeley has created a narrative for how monsters become, and then become holy, and that such a narrative is the result of human technological developments in space travel, and that the monster is then the natural evolution of life on earth (both in terms of the space-dwelling ‘alien’ men and then earth-dwelling ‘hybrid’ animals) intrigues me to no end:

As for the difference between man and animal, there isn’t a huge difference for me. In the “delicate matter” series, the story so far is that man has left earth for outer space because he becomes enamored with something he can’t comprehend, something that is entirely different from what he knows. He leaves earth on bad terms with the animals and while he is gone animals become what they were destined to be, a transformation per se, into heavy metal loving, super power using, pop culture loving creatures. When man gets to space he finds it to be less than he had hoped, and he tries to come back but the animals refuse. So man is stuck in space while animals take he’s [sic] place back on earth, essentially filling his old shoes, and becoming the new ‘man’…The head swapping was a way for me to even more-so humanize the animals. Initially all the human body, animal headed figures in my paintings were referred to as ‘saints,’ figures that were idolized by the other animals and which usually also adorned halos.

Keats suggests that men of Imagination ought to possess “Negative Capability,” essentially the ability to comfortably occupy a space in which paradoxes, contradictions, and elements of the Uncanny abound, without needing to reach for reason or logic to make sense of the experience. I suspect Seeley’s gesture of finding (transcendent?–or at least substantial) value in the monster, and proving as much by elevating him to ‘sacred’ status via the religious icon, is one way to articulate how it is that we can paradoxically fear and ‘make-holy’ an incomprehensible, Uncanny figure.

Edit: 18 March 2012–An Addition

So now, a month and a half later, I’m thinking about Seeley’s work again: I’m home for Spring break, getting my tattoo touched up, and trying to find a new place on my body to ink the deer Icon posted above. There’s something powerful about the image, something that rings deeply true to me about the way we encounter the sublime-in-the-Uncanny. But perhaps I should back up for a second…

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be able to sit on a conference panel to present a paper I had written–and am obsessively adding to–exploring elements of the Uncanny in prosody, particularly something I’m calling poetry’s “Uncanny Sound.” One of the more apt poems I’ve come across in this project is Hart Crane’s “The Hurricane,” a poem in which Crane, standing in the eye of a hurricane, watching it destroy the world on all sides of him, is forced to create a new language to echo–and enact!–the impressiveness and sublimity (i.e. the ‘too much’-ness) of a natural disaster, a language in which old words are razed to make material suitable for the “Uncanny event” and new words are joined to antiquated, Biblical suffixes to anchor the world in some sense of supernatural history. All of this then comes together in an artificial ‘hybrid’ language of contradictions and anachronisms (one half of poetry’s “Uncanny Sound”) that serves the magnificent power of such an experience well, for as the highs are made low with “summits crashing” and lows are made high when “sea-kelp” goes to “high heaven dashing,” so too is the highest language brought down among base terms and the lowest language elevated to the level of scripture. To speak this poem aloud, I’ve discovered, is to summon the power of the hurricane; to become the hurricane, for a time; to internalize it and bring it in you.

So I’m bringing this up alongside my thinking on the Icons because I sense Seeley’s understanding of the natural world of animals corresponding with Crane’s relationship with the natural world of weather, specifically that there is something unnatural inherent to the natural world, unnatural in that there is such otherness (and power in this otherness) present in the natural world at special times that one simply cannot experience as native, incidental, familiar, or safe, but foreign, deliberate, disorienting, and dangerous instead.

What’s happening in these special moments, I’m thinking, is a shift from what Martin Buber calls an I-It relationship with the world to an I-Thou relationship. The relationship one has with ordinary things as objects of experience and use Buber calls I-It, an essentially “detached” relationship (e.g. the one might have with pen); the attitude of the I here is that the It is separate from himself, an object that can be intriguing to observe or fortunate to use, but nothing more. The relationship one has with others, on the other hand (no pun intended), Buber calls I-Thou, and this “involves the whole person;” here, the I, a meaning-making individual, “addresses” a Thou as a meaning-making subject, not an object, and is thus “addressed” as a subject in return. These I-Thou “encounters,” Buber claims, constitute “real life,” in that they are the only authentic and real (i.e. meaningful) relationships one may expect to find in the world. By addressing the existence of the Thou in another, one effectively moves himself toward an intimate, subject-to-subject relationship with the Ultimate Thou, which is God.

So when I say that

I suspect Seeley’s gesture of finding (transcendent?–or at least substantial) value in the monster, and proving as much by elevating him to ‘sacred’ status via the religious icon, is one way to articulate how it is that we can paradoxically fear and ‘make-holy’ an incomprehensible, Uncanny figure.

…what I’m suggesting is that Seeley is finding in the natural world a Thou, not an It; not a world to simply be seen or projected on or used, but a world that looks back, projects back, and uses.

This is a fairly powerful claim as an artistic statement, but more so as a statement of ‘the nature of things’ (as Lucretius would have it). As we begin to transition further into Romanticism and the Romantic poets–the second half of this Technoromanticism idea we’re orbiting–I think we’ll find this conversation sprouting up again and again, begging us to evaluate and then re-evaluate our relationship to our (un)natural world through art in both the traditional sense (painting, music, poetry) and then the non-traditional sense (?, ?, ?).

I was stumbling around the Internet (Wikipedia specifically) yesterday morning, trying to enrich my knowledge of Frankenstein. I’m sure all of you can relate to the endless wandering Wikipedia offers with the hyperlinks embedded in the articles. After a while, I found myself on the page for Golems, which apparently have their origins in the Bible. And eventually I thought of some of the modern representations of golems, especially organic, golem-like figures (such as Frankenstein), and I thought of one of my favorite video games:

Bioshock is already known in the gaming world as a very literary and smart game. As a response to Ayn Rand’s objectivist theories, the world of Bioshock is an underwater city called Rapture, comprised of districts with grandiose, allusive names like Hephaestus, Apollo Square, Aphrodite, etc, and governed by the doctrine that man should be free to reap the rewards of his work without censor and restriction. This, naturally, leads to violent anarchy, and the course of the game toys with the theories of uninhibited free will and living as an ignorant slave, as the player explores this dystopian world.

But while that is the publicly acknowledged critique of the game’s literary value, I have begin to muse about other issues it explores and other works it may be in dialogue with. From the title alone, some sort of collision of life and something else can be inferred. Bioshock: a shock to life by something disruptive, surprising, or strange, or perhaps something that restarts or recalibrates life. The connection to Frankenstein should be apparent at this point.

The large golem-like figure dominating the image is certainly suggestive of some sort of strange form of life in any case. And, to those who have not played the game, one of the major plot points is the discovery that these creatures, the so-called Big Daddies, are real men, mechanically and genetically modified to perform specific (and violent) functions as guardians and enforcers.

But this is not the only example of life-hacking and a relationship with Shelley’s novel. The entire game itself revolves around a protagonist whom was engineered by a “mad scientist” father for the purpose of extending life. This is not initially known, but gradually revealed. In essence, players control a Frankenstein’s monster that was not rejected by the father, but manipulated and continually “built” over the course of the game by way of the strange genetic substance called ADAM, a process that was necessary for survival in Rapture.

As I continue to read through Frankenstein, I’ll probably keep the relationship with Bioshock in mind, as the latter seems to be directly related to the former in questioning the role of science and the bleak possibilities of tampering with life. However, at the moment, I feel my thoughts are too premature to begin to try to fully explain or even organize.

But for one last tidbit, attached below is a link to a small, but scholarly, discussion, begun by Tim Welsh at the University of Loyola, on Posthumanism and Bioshock that some might find interesting:

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2011/03/10/would-you-kindly-bioshock-and-posthuman-choice

Last week, Jen opened up the discussion of Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace,” keying on a dark undertone she perceives in the poem and its resonance with scenes in The Matrix. As I got to the final line of the poem, I too felt a shiver of something cold and not quite right in the affective pitch of “loving grace.” Is there any support in the poem itself for this response, though?  Or is my reading idiosyncratic? An artifact of the age I read it in?

I’m coming to the poem in the era of “ubiquitous computing,” where we are tracked in our transit through myriad electronic media, watched over in an everywhere-dense, ever more finely granular manner by people and systems we have not asked to do this for us. We do not have to imagine being watched over by machines; we are. In the past, the tools of mass surveillance have not had a happy history of use. In imaginative literature, they are a staple of dystopia.

“But,” Jen conjectures, “maybe… Brautigan’s speaker is a genuine optimist?” With this in mind, I reread “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” seeking evidence for either case. What I discovered surprised me, though pleasantly: I could find no explicit support for a foreboding or dark reading, and a preponderance of support for the contrary. Throughout, exclamatory parentheticals strain at the bonds of its present, three times urging: “right now, please!” or similar. Throughout, the emphasis is on harmony, mutuality (“mutually programming harmony”), peace (“where deer stroll peacefully”), liberation (“free of our labors”), Edenic return (“joined back to nature”), primitive domesticity (“returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”), affectively positive all the way from opening “I” to closing period. Everything in the poem rings with unalloyed enthusiasm. The poem seems to offer no intrinsic home to foreboding.

Brautigan tells us directly, too, what he feels so exuberant about.

In his envisioning, electronic machinery, an artifact of human craft, is naturalized, reintegrated with the nature it has emerged from and, imbued with agency, assumes a reciprocal relationship with living creatures. The computers, “watching over” all in title and the last two lines, are themselves now in some sense alive; and figuratively or not, they are imagined to someday “live together” in harmony with mammals (lines 4-6).

Harmony in this poem lives in the mutuality of agency between mammals and computers, in the “cybernetic meadow” (stanza 1, line 3), “cybernetic forest” (stanza 2, line 3), and “cybernetic ecology” (stanza 3, line 3). Reciprocity is essential to the original idea of the cybernetic. As developed by Norbert Wiener and those who came after him, cybernetics is a multidisciplinary study of regulatory systems (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics>)—closely related to the mathematical theory of control, and control theory is fundamentally a theory of feedback loops, of actions and reactions, a give and take between causes and effects, inputs and outputs. Brautigan has imagined what physicists call a dynamic equilibrium, an equilibrium of flows: “Pure [liquid] water / touching clear sky.” Across this boundary water circulates, liquid to vapor, vapor to liquid, endlessly. Schematically, this reciprocity is a loop.

Figure 1: Cover of the 1954 paperback edition of Norbert Wiener's _The Human Use of Human Beings_, with reciprocating arrows.

Figure 2: U.S. Geological Survey illustration of the water cycle, in which water circulates through Earth's ecosystem, a cycle of action inviting cybernetic analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle

We have come far from the cultural moment into which Brautigan brought his poem. In our time, a kind of anxiety has interposed itself into the harmony Brautigan sees beckoning. This anxiety is sufficiently strong to reverse the poem’s gestalt, to flip it over to an ironic reading contrary to the one the poem most directly supports. While an ironic intent cannot be ruled out, nothing seems to be objectively present in the poem to disrupt its imagined harmony.

Naturalizing the artificial, Brautigan’s poem enacts a classically romantic breakdown of categories—the fusion of ideas that Samuel Taylor Coleridge so persistently espoused.  What it operates on, though, are the formative tropes of romanticism itself. It doubles back on romanticism’s pastoral commonplaces, uniting nature with the most highly evolved of human artifice, computer machinery. The poem is paradigmatically techno-romantic. It is a techno-pastoral.

When we acquire a skill, it becomes a “second nature” built upon the original, as if we were born knowing how to do it. It starts out artificial and becomes natural, as we cease to have to think about performing it. In the same way technology, once adapted to the world around us, becomes as if it had always been there. Thinking about how the artificial is assimilated into the natural, and the unaccustomed becomes accustomed, I became curious about the career of the phrase “second nature.” I ran a quick Google Ngram Viewer query:

Figure 3: Google Ngram viewer for "second nature," from 1740 to 1900, with a 3-year smoothing applied. http://books.google.com/ngrams/

Curiously, the bigram “second nature” suddenly ticks upward in frequency around 1790, taking off rapidly later in the decade and on through the early years of the next century. That is, the phrase “second nature” came to prominence (in Google’s dataset) over the same time course that the first generation of English romantic poets came to maturity.

After class the other night, I watched (okay, here I must admit to being rather a nerd) Battlestar Galactic with my boyfriend.  For those of you who haven’t seen the 2004 series (which differs somewhat from the original):  Mankind created the Cylons as slaves, but the Cylons developed sentience.  The Cylons, angry after years of servitude and fearful that their creators might destroy them now that they are sentient, decide to strike first and destroy the humans.  This summary is simplistic at best; the problems between the humans and the Cylons are compounded by religious differences (the Cylons are monotheistic, while the humans believe in a pantheon of gods), grievances from the long war, desires to prove themselves, and more.  Significantly, (and why the show reminded me so strikingly of our discussion in class) during the war, the Cylons evolve from their original form:

 To a model which looks virtually indistinguishable from humans:

However, unlike humans, the Cylons are limited by only a set number of human-like appearances, multiple copies of the same model being possible, both male and female.

What all this builds up to, in a round about way, is that not only do the Cylons illustrate the Uncanny Valley (some humans, overlooking the war and the differences, develop feelings for the humanistic Cylons, even fall in love and start families with them), but the Cylons bring into question what it means to be human.  More than just in appearance, the Cylons are almost indistinguishable from mankind.  Like humans, the Cylons have religious beliefs, emotions, a respect for life (even though they themselves can be reloaded into new bodies like a computer program might be moved from one computer to another), ability to suffer pain, desires to reproduce and have offspring, ability to dream, and more.  In fact, the Cylons are so similar to humans that they have even developed traits that, while we should like to call “inhuman,” the show more than clearly demonstrates are all too human.  Both the Cylons and the humans make use of torture, though one of the first instances of it in the series is the humans is the humans raping and beating a female Cylon.  Further, neither the humans nor their creations are opposed to suicide bombings, terrorism, and murder (even murdering their own people not simply as acts of war).  The humans, when speaking of these acts committed by the Cylons call them “inhuman,” yet when their own people do it, one must admit that it is all too human.  The humans simply argue that their use of such tactics are out of the necessity of war, yet the Cylons could as easily claim the same.  The Cylons are so indistinguishable from their creators that they possess both mankind’s best and worst characteristics.

In spite of this, the humans abhor the Cylons, calling them “monstrous” and “inhuman,” yet when it comes to putting one’s finger on just what makes them different from the humans it is hard.  Is simply declaring it is because they are not us–our creations–enough?  Perhaps it is because they make us all too aware of the inhuman aspects of humanity that we wish to distance ourselves from them.  As we have discussed in class, the line between us and technology (or us and them) is uncertain and shifting at best being so dependant on how one defines technology and it brings into question our identity as humans.

In one of the most recent episodes I’ve seen a doctor emerges from a medical tent, covered in blood.  A Cylon approaches him and, indicating the blood, asks if it is Cylon or human as “it all looks the same.” This is a perfect summation for my argument:  There is almost no difference between the Cylons and the humans, indistinguishable from each other even by members of the same race. Simply by existing, the Cylons bring into question how we differentiate between human and inhuman.  The same question that is approached through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in discussion of monstrosity: Is it possible that humans can be less “human,” more “monstrous,” than their creations?  Both the Cylons and Frankenstein’s Wretch would readily answer  yes; humanity can be inhuman and the inhuman can be far more humane, at times.

Reading the comments in Amanda’s post has me thinking about the line separating the term “hacking” from other words we perhaps use more commonly: “altering,” “adjusting,” “re-appropriating,” ”translating,” “transporting,” “transforming,” maybe even “evolving.” Inasmuch as we’ve really had time to converse as a community thus far, we’ve seemed to want to use these aforementioned terms more-or-less interchangeably. And though I suppose “hacking” is often used in a more pejorative sense than are the synonymous(?) terms we seem to keep skirting around–or at least the term carries with it a slightly more negative connotation, even if for no other reason than its association with the fearful, unknowable world of modern technology–I’m left thinking, is there something more that separates this term from the others, something beyond its association with computers?

I admittedly know or understand very little (read: nothing at all) about the computer hacking world, so I’ll have to defer some of my thinking on this until Phil, Amanda, and others of you educate me on it, but for whatever reason it seems important to me now to clarify our definition in its original context (i.e. computers) some if we aim to apply it to other technologies (e.g. books). If “hacking” means more than simply “tinkering with,” that will mean one thing for us; if “hacking” only means “tinkering with,” then that will require us to use some adjectives to describe the intentions (good, or bad, or simply curious) of respective hacking processes.

Note: Something I had forgotten but feel obligated to recognize–Phil had this to say about hacking/altering:

“It’s worth more thought than I can devote to it for the moment, but it’s certainly a practice of appropriation. In our time the hacker ethos of making technology one’s own comes to us by many paths…To hack a book–to take a first hack at it–could be to come to fluency within the system of book-making, to appropriate the received technology of book production and printing for one’s own unique artistic vision, to appropriate past books, [etc.]“

I’d still like to delve into this a bit more, but I’m sure it’s something we’ll get around to on Thursday.

In the meantime, here’s something fun to look at:

Dario Robleto: "You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses."

Guernica magazine recently featured an interview with Dario Robleto–one of my favorite visual artists and one of the more interesting and versatile thinking-people I’ve come across (as you’ll see in the interview)–in which Robleto talks about using ‘dead’ objects as material for ‘new,’ ‘living’ artwork. Some examples (quoting Guernica’s Rebecca Bates):

Mammoth hair plucked from receding glaciers is braided into flowers in the Victorian tradition (“Some Longings Survive Death”); album covers of live performances of dead musicians are used to make stage lights (“Candles Un-burn, Suns Un-shine, Death Un-dies”); cotton and soldiers’ letters to their wives become pulp for new paper used in wreaths (“Defiant Gardens”)…human hand bones are set in a circle with the 50,000-year-old claws of extinct cave bears

…and all of this to “tur[n] the original materials into something else, something almost unrecognizable, and in doing so ignit[e] a conversation about how we wrestle with grief, and how turning that grief into something tangible may or may not be a comfort.”

Without pulling too much more from the interview itself (go check it out), I’ll leave you with this gem of a selection for now. Maybe we can have some sort of conversation on whether Robleto is “hacking” art, “altering” his materials, or something else altogether, in the comments.

Guernica: The materials you use often take on a new form. For example, you’re no longer able to listen to the pulled tape of the earliest audio recording of time, so I’m wondering if you find there’s a sense of destruction inherent in the act preservation?

Dario Robleto: I understand that this could be the interpretation. But if you want to really understand what I’m doing, I ask the viewer to make a leap, to not immediately understand alteration as destruction. You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses. It’s like what I was saying about the Victorians and us understanding past ways of thinking through a modern point of view, which we can’t help. That’s the moment we live in, but it’s not the only way. To understand something changing form as a destructive act is a very modern, Western gut reaction to things, and I get it. But what I’m suggesting is nothing radical, this notion of things constantly changing, and that the change is not inherently destructive. Things change, our bodies change, everything’s changing, and to me that philosophy’s no different with these materials. With audiotape or the paper or any number of things I use, what is initiated by the alteration is the art. The artwork, the discussion around it, the fact that we’re talking now—all these things that are set in motion are part of the constructive nature of alteration. It’s never a violent destructive act; to me it’s always a respectful, constructive, pushing-the-story-forward act.

*Dario Robleto has a website at: http://www.acmelosangeles.com/artists/dario-robleto/

“When losing a phone feels like losing a piece of your soul, you’ve become a cyborg.” –Jad Abumrad

I’m thinking of my “favorite aspect of technology” in terms of later class discussion and the syllabus in general, primarily the definition of technology—whether it must be utilitarian and whether it can have agency.

It seems to me that the “glitches” I enjoy might appeal to me because they make the machine feel fallible and therefore human. Mixing up people’s pictures, mis-guessing the next word—those are things I might do. And it’s pretty human to sympathize with a consciousness that feels to be “like me.” And there it is–these mistakes make me recognize technology as a consciousness. And it makes me giggle! Humor after all, seems to be a mix of that which is delightful and that which is terrifying. It’s like the uncanny. The familiar and the unfamiliar, in the same space. The shiver, or laugh, seems to emanate from the inability to understand which one is covering the other—which is the real and which is the costume. Is the technological consciousness friendly and familiar? Or is it taking over? (Could the takeover be parental or for our own good, as suggested by Brautigan? I feel the shiver/giggle again at that idea, which seems to repeat the same uncanny trick.)

And now that Freud is brought into my ramblings, I can talk about the other effect of those charmingly frightening glitches. Regarding a human consciousness, we tend to believe that slip-ups reveal truth. Whether we learned the technique directly from Freud, from popular culture’s appropriation of his ideas, or whether the instinct is much older than either, we tend to watch for the subconscious to poke through and reveal the great truth of who we are. In this way, a computer glitch becomes the technological subconscious poking out at me.

I mentioned in class that I was delighted by the way my iPhone mixes up my friend’s pictures. It’s funny because it’s silly. It’s funny because it brings technology down to a human level. And it’s terrifying because it brings human beings down to the level of the machine. This happens because of the recognition of consciousness in what I want to be only a tool. (I see the errors as more evidence of human-like consciousness, by the way, than a computer’s common trick of, say, computing.)

In the particular glitch I mentioned, the slip up goes further. It tells me that the computer can’t tell people apart. It mixes us up! We are numbers or objects to the brain that we have built. So as I recognize a frightening humanity in the machine, I know that it does not recognize mine.

Hi all,

Just thought I’d share my mental reflex to  Brautigan, which was, naturally, a vision of Keanu Reeves dripping with goo in The Matrix. (Hope this isn’t a spoiler!)

After some thought, there do seem to be a few fairly sturdy justifications of this connection…the Machines’ human harvest fields seem to align with the poem’s “cybernetic meadow” (line 3), and collectively they serve as a pessimistic manifestation of a “cybernetic ecology” (line 19).  Such an eco(techno?)system would certainly, in a sense, make us humans “free of our labors” (line 20)…to such an extent, in fact, that the user becomes the tool.

It is this sort of dark undertone that, as I read it, pervades the poem. But, maybe there is an argument that Brautigan’s speaker is a genuine optimist?

Cheers,

Jen