Authors:

 Little, Gregory.

Title:

 "Inhabiting the Body without Organs"

Keywords:

 virtual reality, emergence, The body without organs, Artaud, Visible Human Project, Caesar Project, binding problem, qualia, body process, Gestalt Therapy, Multiple Drafts Model
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Abstract:

 As a consequence of Cartesian mind-body bifurcation our physicality, despite its packaging within the discourses of biology, beauty, ergonomics, spirituality, and fashion, remains alien to most of us. In "A Manifesto for Avatars" I challenged myself and others to step outside these discourses, "to cast off the dumbing down manacles of holistics, universals, boundaries, acceptablilities, salvations, moral imperatives, family values, personal fantasies, dualisms, and the 'god trick'" and to, in Artaud's words, build ourselves a "body without organs". For invencao I propose to share my tracks across this terrain.
From my current VR project emerges a field of intersecting trajectories, coalescing into four informatic structures: 1.) Anatomical architectures-3D datasets of computer models, one a Full Body 3D Laser Scan of myself producing an external digital skin, and another of models of internal human anatomy modeled from registering transverse CT, MRI, and cryosectional images from the Visible Human Project; 2.) Subjective narratives-A database of dissected personal narratives, recorded during body-oriented Gestalt Psychotherapy with Dr. James Kepner. The narratives will be translated into digital video, audio, and texts; 3.) Philosophical structures-architectures and narratives linked in accordance with philosophical interpretations of consciousness, primarily "The Body without Organs" as interpreted by Delueze and Guattari. The experience of narrative events within virtual space will be structured parallel to Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Model", creating an anti-Cartesian narrative, and 4.) Participatory interaction--The particular sensory aspects of a subjective narrative, i.e. sound, color, imagery, or dialogue are dissected, deterritorialized, and "unbound" from their originary narrative and recombined in new ways through the participant's interaction, in an effort to reterritorialize my own personal narratives into new emergent qualia for the "user".
These structures form an anatomical landscape that is visceral, sensual, biologically accurate and psychically whimsical. The seeing eye is unanchored from the external "out there" and turned inside out, free to roam the body, to look at the "in here" that is simultaneously part of us and inaccessible to us. The organs, relieved of any organic imperatives, become autonomous agents, nomads, repositories of narratives, responsive to the movements of one another and the "user". Internal becomes external, subjective objective, and memory becomes emergent experience as consciousness is redistributed across real and virtual bodies.
Little, Gregory. Gregory.Little@oberlin.edu Kent State University Gregory Little is an artist working with digital media, as well as a critical theorist and Professor of Art at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. He has been working with technical and theoretical issues relative to virtual reality, 3D simulation, digital video, animation, and Web based artworks since 1990. Work from his recently completed "A Manifesto for Avatars" (1991-98) has been exhibited as part of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; Gallery of the Present-Extension in Hamburg Germany, at E. S. Van Dam Gallery in NYC, and in several museums, universities, and galleries in the US. "A Manifesto for Avatars" was presented as a part of the Webs of Discourse symposium at Texas Tech University, at Consciousness Reframed, at CaiiA, University of Newport, Wales College, and will be published in "Interface", the Journal of Comparative Literature, Texas Tech, in1999. His current project addresses issues of subjectivity, distributed consciousness, and reterritorialized memory as emergent experience in the context of interactive virtual reality simulations. He has a MFA in Painting from Yale University, a BFA from Indiana University. He has taught at Brown University, Oberlin College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Connecticut College, the University of Rhode Island, and holds tenure in the School of Fine Arts at Kent State University, Stark Campus, Canton Ohio, USA.