Note: The work of photographer Linda Dawn Hammond, as referred to and presented in Spasm, is from the THREE PART BODYSERIES- a series of triptych portraits. The "digitally remade face" which appears on the cover and throughout the book is derived from the triptych, "Francis".

 

A Ride Through Bi-Modern America

Author: John Noto

Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Flesh (with companion CD). New York: St.

Martin's Press, 1994.

...SPASM is a book about virtual reality, android music, and electric flesh. Refusing to stand outside

virtual reality (which is impossible anyway), this is a virtual book, half text/ half music. A floating

theory that puts into writing virtual reality's moment of flux as that point where technology acquires

organicity, where digital reality actually comes alive, begins to speak, dream, conspire, and seduce.

 

So begins Arthur Kroker's Spasm, a book and CD which are first and foremost a story of bi-modern America in the 1990's, meaning the story of a people both immersed in the postmodern realm of cyberculture, where the human body is "invaded" by technology to the extent that persons and their electro-mechanical "prostheses" merge to form the cyborg/android of science-fiction, and critically distanced from it, questioning and attempting to foil the relentless progress of the computerized simulscape as it moves to monitor our minutest functioning in orgies of meaningless data collection and public opinion polls. Spasm is, simultaneously, the story of three artists: an electronic music composer, a photographer and a multi-media performer/installation creator, who delineate our descent into, and endeavors to frustrate, the space of virtual reality, that place where simulation overtakes the "real" and "true" and effectively substitutes for them. That state of affairs is already upon us in a society where the average TV viewing time per family per day is alleged to be upwards of eight hours. The conversion to virtual reality also manifests in subtler ways. Our language has been polluted by advertising and government propaganda with "doublespeak", words which mean one thing but sound like another. Military jargon is particularly poignant here - to "liquidate" or "terminate" "personnel" means to kill people, often civilians, but sounds so much milder and works to soothe our adverse reaction to the deaths of children and grandmothers while promoting the drugged feeling of having been told a pleasant little white lie. Another example is magazine advertising. We are told, of a perfume, "This is cool", captioned under a photo of a woman with an emotionally blank and distant stare, that of an automaton. Yet, she is a "sign" (a representation) of smooth seduction; perhaps she is about to ensnare her mate with the cold calculation of a radar dish, embellished, of course, with the proper fashion accoutrements! We know somewhere, dimly, in the backs of our minds that this has little bearing on "real" love relationships, but, after all, they are so terribly messy. Maybe the simulation is better, more easily disposable if it goes awry.

The three artists each in his/her own medium facilitate a more visceral understanding of where this kind of thinking came from and where it goes when taken to its logical (and illogical) conclusions. They each portray the tension of trying to hold on to one's humanity, one's conscience, one's sensitivity, in an era of high velocity interaction, techwar and nerve-deadening noise on every bandwidth in every sensory mode.

A woman named Linda Dawn Hammond photographs denizens of the urban underground - the pierced, the tattooed, the shaved, the leather-bound, with a view which emphasizes their usage of the signs and symbols of primitive ornamentation and scarification in a hypermodern plumage display signaling the "disappearance" of the organic body and the birth of interchangeable android bodies, sites for both self-immolation in the desecrated flesh and for limitless excess: Fully cinematic bodies who transform every orifice into a spectral special effect... A carnival of decomposition (of the old body) where the past rituals of fetishism are first scavenged for their totemic signs, and then hard-wired into the skin of techno-mutants as its emblematic screen-effect. It's as though these young "children" of high-tech have chosen to electrify their own flesh with the most primal adornments transforming them into a kind of liquid-crystal display status: the body as electronic billboard, flashing, violent, powerful and ultimately meaningless, yet existing in a splendid state of rebellion against the stifling oppression of "normal" dress and decorum. The body sacrificed to explode the myth of non-conformity-as-death! Pierced nipples may not be showing up in the financial district anytime soon, but beware the officemate who browses Heavy Metal magazine at lunch and collects latexwear catalogues. He/she may represent the first wave of cybernauts suffusing every nook and cranny of the urban-global village with the cynical humor of their own mutation.

Note: Excerpt- Complete Review at...

http://www.ctheory.com/r37.html

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