Posthuman Renaissance

1
Post-human Renaissance

• Or,
• Bodies Are Media Too!

2
Optical renaissance society of the spectacles

• Medici Line by Spectacular Optical
• Love comes in at the eye
• The eye is the window to the soul
• We make inexpensive glasses for the 3rd World
  and missile-guidance systems for NATO
• Also make Videodrome

3
Renaissance Season One (est. 1500-1660)

• Man the prime point of reference in the
  universe
• Made in Gods image, which guarantees his
  knowledge
• Principle problem relationship between mind and
  body
• Answer pineal gland! (René Descartes)

4
Renaissance Season Two

• Technology the centre of the human universe
• Made in mans image (but we forget this)
• Principle problem relationship between bodies
  and machines
• Answer cyborgs!

5
Back to the Futurism (c.1909-1915)

• Marinetti men and machines must blend into one
  super-being!
• Centaurs of modernity!
• Interpenetration of planes, bodies
• Cybernetic organism

Marinetti in his Fiat
6
Anti-humanism

• Man is something that has to be overcome
  (Nietzsche)
• It is comforting and a source of profound relief
  to think that man is only a recent invention, a
  figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle
  in our knowledge, and that he will disappear
  again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a
  new form. (M. Foucault)

7
Cyborg manifesto!

• Beyond biological determinism, beyond humanism,
  beyond gender
• Hybrid of animal and machine
• transgressed boundaries, potent fusions,
  dangerous possibilities
• Monstrous and illegitimate

Donna Haraway
8
Max Renn

• Yes, as in short for Renaissance
• Our very own postmodern Renaissance man
• Like Travis Bickle but he looks into TVs, not
  mirrors
• Whos talking to him?

9
Becoming-machine

• Hand-gun (literalizing a pun)
• Hand-grenade (literalizing a pun)

10
Invagination

• Masculine and feminine and more
• High-tech challenges traditional dualisms
  (male/female, animal/machine, etc.)
• By modifying our flesh

11
Max Renn not an artist!

• Hasnt the temperament to produce
• Nor is he political
• Has no philosophy
• He is the small businessman the medium of
  messages and products

12
Man becomes medium

• Max plays various software/programs/ cassettes
• He is the hardware in which this software
  operates
• Memory as playback, will as coded instruction

13
And the medium is the message
14
Toward the New Flesh

• Post-organic life?
• From the human to the post-human Brian OBlivion
• From the space of Humanism
• To the space of virtuality the archive of video

15
End of the Old Flesh

• Horror of the organic, corporeal revulsion
• Disgust for the merely human
• Call for transcendence?

16
Machine-becoming-flesh

• Liberated from old flesh
• Technology lives
• Breathes
• Bleeds
• Oozes
• Squirms

17
Criticism baffled!

• the film undeniably dichotomizes the source of
  disaster it is politicized (externalized), and
  it is sexualized (internalized). The split is
  epitomized in the mechanism by which the
  hallucinations are created the Videodrome
  subsignal, transmittable under any picture, is
  one cause but so is the presence of sadistic
  sexual appetite in the viewer. And yet as the
  film goes along, it gravitates more and more
  towards a primacy of the personal and the
  psychic.
• William Beard, The Artist as Monster

18
No! The internal and external are the same

• Inner and outer different aspects of the same
  medium
• Body-machine
• Desire is a function of media media are a
  function of desire
• The psyche is a technology
• We are the sex organs of technologies

19
Reaction media-harm theory

• Spectacular Optical new Puritans
• Luddites
• Destroy the weak through their own addiction
• Pornography as sin, corrupting the human
• pure, and erect, and strong

20
Utopianism Cathode Ray Mission

• Patching the socially outcast back into the
  worlds mixing board
• Redemption through radiation
• Mediation answer to homelessness?

21
Transcendental homelessness

• Political unconscious of television
• Home for the homeless, collectivity of the
  anonymous
• Gathering of the post-human
• Virtuality

22
But wait this is a film

• Film performs mediatic coping-strategy with the
  rival medium of TV
• Refuses Hollywood
• Emits B-movie signals
• Porno, snuff films
• Grubbiness, garish cheap colour
• Punk, underground provenance
• Canadian state funding

23
B-Movie signals

• Science fiction
• Horror
• Conspiracy Thriller
• Detective fiction
• Authenticity here consists in the adamant
  refusal of the high ground

24
Maps a palimpsest of postmodern social spaces

• Media space (TV studio, TV station office, radio
  studio, convention centre, etc.)
• Retail space (optometrist, restaurant, etc.)
• Virtual space (videodrome signals,
  hallucinations, VR helmet, etc)
• Intimate space (Maxs apartment living room,
  bedroom)
• Liminal space (derelicts, Mission, harbourside,
  the limits of the social field)

25
The Dead

• Nicki Brand
• Brian OBlivion
• Video archive
• New Flesh
• spirit is a matter of code circulating through
  various media
• Is TV our afterlife, our graveyard?