by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart
The body has been the place within digital culture where the line
between virtual and physical reality has been drawn, a contemporary
version of the idea of a Cartesian mind-body split. In digital culture,
the corporeal body is contrasted with the virtual/technological one,
manifesting in the cyborg; the body/machine being first posited by Donna
Haraway
1 within the context of first wave feminism. The
cyborgian idea was thought of in many ways as a liberation from the
constraints of gender identification.
Akin to the cyborg is the post-human being, one that is beyond a single
physical identity. Like the cyborg, the post-human is both physical
being and machine, but a dystopic one not imagined as a liberation as
Haraway thought of the cyborg. This hybrid human references the
automaton. In post-photographic 3D cinema this means using stock digital
bodies loaded with stock animation. Such generic, anatomically accurate
humanoid bodies can be easily culled from digital libraries found
online, or from popular low-cost character development software programs
such as Poser™.
Preset naturalistic animation sequences - character walk cycles, stair
climbing, dancing, exercising - can also be loaded into these generic
bodies and then imported into a virtual environment, creating a 21
st
century choreographic version of the synthesized animated collage
prevalent in earlier experimental filmmaking. Virtual collaging permits
bodies, objects, and spaces to be re-deployed, recontextualized and
juxtaposed in infinitely recombinant variations, just as fragments of
externally referenced meaning in clippings from newspapers and magazines
were used by Picasso and Braque in the early 20th century. Choreographed
motion scenarios made from found movements use techniques that permit
the dissociated feeling of pasted-together collage, lending characters
an erie unnatural / yet natural feeling.
This is only one way of animating a digital body. Real-world motions can
also be captured by hacking popular 3D computer games. Tutorials widely
distributed on the Internet teach users to adapt popular games like the
x-Box Kinect, a motion sensing input device used to track the movement
of objects and individuals in three dimensional space. This hack also
allows individuals to capture motion, insert it into character models,
and then edit it to create narratives or some other variety of digital
performance. Naturalistic human motion can therefore be reformulated by
using techniques native to the art of computerized choreographic
collage: copying, pasting and repeating actions to create patterns,
loops, and scratches, endowing motion sequences with a robotic,
automated sense despite its using captured, naturalistic movement as its
starting point. The result is a cinematic representation of the human
that is somehow realistic and yet completely artificial, both real and
unreal at the same time.
Both the cyborg and the post-human idea of a cinematic character have
evolved in relation to the idea of an avatar. Avatars are virtual
"costumes" worn on-line, personalized synthetic bodies often adopted on
the internet. The rich manifestations of avatars in post-photographic
simulations are the hyper-real beings that convince the viewer of their
flesh and substance, obfuscating the corporeal/virtual body split, and
blurring the edge between a representation and the real. They explore a
plastic territory or "synthetic corporeality" that freely traverses
between physical and virtual references to body, representing a fluidity
of the self that reflects contemporary psychological paradigms.
This hybridization is not unique in the history of art. Both the cyborg
and the post-human can be contextualized within the art history of the
grotesque. Standing outside of known categories - of gender or otherwise
- a digital body is monstrous, blending and merging things impossible in
the real world outside the realm of high-tech surgery. It permits the
hybridization of the animal or vegetable with the human, as well as the
machine with the human, symbols of the unconscious and the imaginary
which were actually first glimpsed in the marginalia of medieval
manuscripts and Gothic architecture.
1. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991)