Beyond the cyborg: performance, attunement and autonomous computation

ABSTRACT

Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: they enable forms of hybrid embodiment such as the cyborg, whose diverse representations by artists and performers have infiltrated our societal normative regime. To talk about body politics is therefore to talk about the technologies the body incorporates, how they probe its alleged integrity. Performance theories and practices offer a fertile ground of experimentation with this issue. Yet, there is a tendency to frame body technologies as either material extensions of one’s body or external objects one perceives with. Such approaches support technocratic systems of beliefs by eliding immaterial and pre-conscious aspects of technological incorporation, I argue. Key to this argument is the notion of automaticity; a subjective form of psychic attunement with particular technical instruments. The performativity of certain bodily thresholds enables forms of human–machine codependence, where body and technology affect each other through discipline, training and relational economies of desire. As a case study, I offer an autoethnographic analysis of my own performance with an artificially intelligent body technology. This reveals an inherently hybrid and relational corporeality, which confounds the boundaries between human and technical, material and immaterial, perceptual and psychological, conscious and pre-conscious.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyborg
• performance
• hybridity
• automaticity
• affect
• computation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marco Donnarumma is a performance artist and scholar. He received a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016 and is currently a Research Fellow at Berlin University of the Arts. Here, he leads a practice-based 2-year research project combining performance art, body theory and embodied robotics. His performances and artworks toured over 60 countries and are regularly presented at leading art events. His current research looks at the links between ritual performance, autonomous computation and body politics through the lens of abjection and intimacy. He has published across the fields of performance studies, aesthetics, human–computer interaction and unconventional computing.

Notes

1. See also David Sudnow’s classic work on learning piano improvisation, where he uses phenomenological insights to describe how his hands (not himself) learned to improvise through a progressively more intimate relationship with the piano; a know-how earned through an understanding of the unconscious aspects involved in learning and performing embodied practices.

2. William James was a seminal American philosopher and psychologist, acknowledged as a leader of the philosophical movement of pragmatism and of the psychological movement of functionalism.

3. At a methodological level, my use of autoethnography draws on the works of Sobchack (2010) with prosthesis phenomenology and Bowers (2002) with electro-acoustic instrument design.

4. A trailer of the performance lives at http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/corpus-nil/, while an integral recording can be found at https://vimeo.com/205899193.

5. In physiology, the former is known as mechanomyogram, the latter as electromyogram. The technically inclined reader may find interesting to look at Caramiaux, Donnarumma, and Tanaka (2015) and Donnarumma (2017) for further details.

6. ‘Becoming’ is a standard philosophical term, originating in Heraclitus’ doctrine. It has been differently explored by Western philosophers including Hegel, Marx, Bergson and Whitehead, and later used in the work of Simondon, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, among others. More recently, the current of New Materialism (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012) developed the notion further.

7. I will describe how a performance of Corpus Nil generally unfolds drawing on my memories and corporeal knowledge of the experience. However, each iteration of the performance is slightly different and not all iterations would perfectly fit this description.

8. This is normally at an angle, since moths read light as the moon.

9. The topic of movement as affect is as fascinating as it is broad. While this text is not the adequate site to discuss it, the interested reader may find relevant the views on this issue by philosopher Manning (2009) and scholar Portanova (2013). For related reflections in the more particular context of movement and technology, see Salazar Sutil and Popat (2015).

10. The same holds true in the case of other living non-human entities, including animals, microorganism and plants, which actively participate in human corporeality. See the already mentioned works by Parker-Starbuck (2006) and Despret (2004), as well as Haraway (2003) on what she calls ‘companion species’ and Game (2001) on human–horse relationships.

11. The list could be extended much further by looking at visual arts. Francis Bacon and Paul Thek are just two notable examples among many others.