Disposable Bodies Video Essay
I was immediately inspired while reading Norbert Wiener's "Men, Machines, and the World" to address a visual topic that also involved social responsibility. The more theoretical work I read about media studies, the visual studies, and digital media, the more I was drawn into the notion of our changing view of our self and our bodies. Here I was drawn to the work of Amelia Jones's "Dispersed Subjects and the Demise of the 'Individual 1990s Body in/as Art'" and N. Katherine Hayles' "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." We are constantly rethinking our bodily-kinesthetic relationship to computers based on the evolving technology of the interface. The new tablet technology I use in the video is only the most recent manifestation of this.
However, the continued technologizing and multiplying of our bodies really only applies to those who constantly and consistently use this technology. I began to think about a lecture I attended by Toby Miller in which he theorized our relationship to the television itself, as a thing. Our relationship with television screens and computer screens is not permanent, both metaphorically and physically. The physical object of the screen will become obsolete as new technology comes to replace the old. What happens to the self when the computer, which was once intimately connected to us, is disposed of? What happens to those bodies that must deal with our techno-trash?
I propose that our relationship with the technobody, our and others, is entirely dependent on real world social and political realities. Why else would we dump e-waste in developing countries where damage is being done to poor bodies of color?
Making this video essay was an interesting process. I researched in the same way I would to write an essay, but the evidence I used seems more random and required more analysis on my part to make connections. I also have not used irony in written essays before, but appreciate their use in visual text, and found it much easier to be visually ironic than on paper. I felt as if the technical process took up more time, not because of the use of video editing software, but because I was acutely aware that others would be viewing this video, and it was not just an exchange between myself and a professor.
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Kimball: Your reflections above are very interesting to me. The public nature of this work changes it (for the better). Why is so much of our training private (to a professor) and not directed to our peers and world who hold us accountable in a variety of ways? The irony in your piece is its primary voice: you let all the players hang themselves. But how are you impliacted: on your blog, with your video, and all your accumulation of e-waste; the piece is not particularly self-reflexive (by design). Finally, yours is perhaps the most "theoretical" of the bunch: explicitly quoting theory across its body. This really affects its flow and tone: locking it to academia even as it is constituted differently than a paper. I think this is something you can think through.
ReplyDeleteKimball: This piece is really powerful. It progresses at a pace that intensifies the impact. Concluding with the low-tech and major pollutant contamination occurring in places where people are extracting precious metals from discarded computers, underscores the awful dichotomies recent technological advances have created. Excellent work.
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