From shulea@waag.org Wed Sep 16 16:31:37 1998 Received: from [194.134.18.57] (A47.waag.org [194.134.18.57]) by A01.waag.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id QAA13393 for ; Wed, 16 Sep 1998 16:31:36 +0200 Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 16:31:36 +0200 Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: tabody@waag.org From: shu lea cheang Subject: forum press release http://brandon.guggenheim.org In collaboration with the 16th World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam, the Guggenheim Museum and Society for Old and New Media present BRANDON, a public interface/installation at Theatrum Anatomicum, DeWaag from September 18 to September 21 with an Opening Party on 17:30 September 19 and a netlinked forum entitled "Digi Gender Social Body: Under the Knife, Under the Spell of Anesthesia". Held simultaneously in Theatrum Anatomicum, DeWaag (Amsterdam) and the videowall at the Guggenheim Museum Soho (New York), the forum invites interface/intervention from the net public. September 20, Sunday, 1998 14:00-16:00 20:00-22:00 Guggenheim Museum SoHo Theatrum Anatomicum 575 Broadway (at Prince Street) DeWaag, Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam log on: http://brandon.guggenheim.org The forum, held in conjunction with Shu Lea Cheang's "Brandon: A One Year Narrative Project in Installments" at the Guggenheim Museum, relocates the17th century public dissecting lessons held in Amsterdam's Theatrum Anatomicum as a digital-age net spectacle. Moderated by Lisa Cartwright with cultural critics, genderists and biotechnologist (in New York: Lisa Cartwright, Jennifer Gonzalez,Vernon Rosario, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Jennifer Terry; in Amsterdam: Jose Van Dijck, Ruth Oldenziel, Susan Stryker), this forum convenes a virtual surgical operation on the theory and construction of technosocial bodies. Members of the public will be invited to participate on-line as well. Theatrum Anatomicum interface: design: Mieke Gerritzen, Janine Huizenga programming: Roos Eisma, Bram Boskamp installation: Joep van Lieshout construction: Atelier van Lieshout BRANDON is curated by Matthew Drutt for the Guggenheim Museum. Caroline Nevejan and Suzanne Oxnaar present BRANDON for the Society for Old and New Media. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Scott L. Gutterman Director of Public Affairs Guggenheim Museum SoHo 575 Broadway New York, NY 10012 Tel (212) 423-3840 Fax (212) 941-8410 E-mail: sgutterman@guggenheim.org Mylene van Noort Society for Old and New Media De Waag, Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR Amsterdam Tel: 31-20-557980 Fax:31-20-5579880 E-mail: mylene@waag.org From shulea@waag.org Wed Sep 16 18:44:37 1998 Received: from [194.134.18.57] (A47.waag.org [194.134.18.57]) by A01.waag.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id SAA15209 for ; Wed, 16 Sep 1998 18:44:36 +0200 Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 18:44:36 +0200 Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: tabody@waag.org From: shu lea cheang Subject: update It is wednesday.. a check on all panelists- should we engage in some dialogue on how to proceed at the forum as Jon has suggested? I am assuming that Jennifer Gonzalez will come in with texts input- I don't know where Sandy's cybership is landing.. I don't know if Banff will procide technical assistance for Sandy? do we have slides at the Guggen now? please update, someone? sl From shulea@waag.org Wed Sep 16 20:35:20 1998 Received: from [194.134.18.57] (A47.waag.org [194.134.18.57]) by A01.waag.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id UAA15877 for ; Wed, 16 Sep 1998 20:35:19 +0200 Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 20:35:19 +0200 Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: tabody@waag.org From: shu lea cheang Subject: topics and quotes for forum data hi, I started the process of organizing some quotes from tabody@waag under the headings that Lisa has set out... note that these data would go up before the live forum discussion. you can check on how this is being lay out at http://www.intra.waag.org/brandon/TAbody/forumapplet/java/ we should have the site pretty much linked up by tomorrow.. as here in Amsterdam, we launch the forum interface on Friday. Please add, delete, edit.. the quotes listed below. note that the netusers' input on those topics would mixed into yours... sl *textual violence A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduction constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription. Given this circumstance in which a minority discourse comes to ground in the physical, a counterdiscourse is critical. --sandy stone *avatar attack Might not the same be said for transgendered identity? Does the digital represent such an easy conduit from one identity to another that it eventually deflates the "risk" involved in analog transformations? --Matthew Drutt One's sense of gender and of sex is usually an extremely embodied one--grounded in the internal perception of the material, bodily surface. -- Vernon Rosario *technosocial body technosocial body is the fantasy we dream of becoming, the nightmare from which we hope to wake, the shadow that haunts our waking memoy. -- Susan Stryker Rauschning found a way to delicately coat the surface of the tissue with a complex glycerol mixture, let it set for a time, and then angle the camera just so. Surfaces digitized in this way evinced a tremendous depth and brilliance, better than anything the Biostructure team had seen. --Sandy Stone I am curious about how our different investments in Brandon might inflect what stakes we have in inviting or resisting the era of the technosocial body. --Jennifer Terry Can we imagine a multi-handed technosocial body? -- Lisa Cartwright *cross-section The VHP, just like the Renaissance anatomical theater, functions as a criminal court, which disciplines the living by sentencing criminals to dissection - or, more accurately, cross-section. --Jose van Dijck the refutation of pop notions of postmodernism through the revelation of interiority and depth. --Susan Stryker *slice to produce novel possibilities for interaction through the disruption of existing surfaces. --Susan Stryker Brandon is a magical sign in certain subcultural circles, especially the (sometimes conflictual/sometimes allied) scenes of transgender politics, lesbian-feminist politics, and butch identity politics, to name only the most obvious. --Jennifer Terry Joseph Jernigan, the convicted criminal who donated his body to the VHP, is not only inscribed by his own past as a criminal, but also by the larger cultural- historical context of the anatomic spectacle. --Jose van Dijck *artifact The image of the cyborg body functions as a site of condensation and displacement. It contains on its surface and in its fundamental structure the multiple fears and desires of a culture caught in the process of transformation. --Jennifer Gonzalez *the real body I spend my time examining material bodies (listening to hearts, doing rectal exams, etc.) that I find all this cyber chat a bit disconnected from the hard realities of people--particularly TG folks. -- Vernon Rosario the real body is not synonymous with the human organism, but rather with that which most insistently demands intelligible representation to others. -- Susan Stryker I'm not suggesting we hold a seance or get back to "the real" Brandon (as if...), but instead to explore the effects generated by giving "Brandon" a symbolical centrality in the scene we are creating here. --Jennifer Terry how can we acknowledge the tactile and the low-tech, the mundane and the smelly materials we construct out of? -- Lisa Cartwright *genitalia The historical agent ("Brandon Teena") left behind only cryptic evidence of thoughts and dreams about the possibilities of technologically transforming the body. --Jennifer Terry *dissect The anatomist, rather than the cadaver, constituted the focal point of a public dissection in the theater. Some anatomists were excellent performers, as they translated their tactile experience into imaginative, visual narrative. -- Jose van Dijck I do think it is important not to be so PoMo, radical, theoretico-cynical in our thinking as to pretend the erasure of any distinctions in people's sense of reality. -- Vernon Rosario *viscera *knife Transsexual procedures can, I think, be consided a transformation of the imaginary into something tangible --Susan Stryker *glove what is the effect of constantly visualizing the inner body of the patient while undergoing surgery? What does it do for the patient as well as for the physician? --Jose van Dijck *tissue The Visible Human Project's proposal included the whole enchilada -- obtaining bodies, translating them into digital streams, and reconstructing the streams into human simulacra. --Sandy Stone it seems like a lot of new technologies from the fantasy of leech therapy to surgical innovations to the digital have been billed as potential sources of youth- or monstrosity- making. What is different about the digital? --Lisa Cartwright *Intersex Anyone who cannot distinguish between the risks of digital transformation vs. the risks of material/ surgical transformation is in big trouble. --Vernon Rosario The land of intersex without bodies, bodies without organs, organs without orgasms, orgasms without orgies, seems to have become the world's largest virtual theme park. --Jose van Dijck *organs Anyone who cannot distinguish between the risks of digital transformation vs. the risks of material/surgical transformation is in big trouble. -- Vernon Rosario The X-rayed body, stripped of its overinscribed gender- and race-encoded epidermis and organs, is an apt figure both for the nigtmare of eugenics, with its agenda of eradicating some body types, and for utopian fantasies of a social order no longer predicated on typologies on the organic body. -- Lisa Cartwright From shulea@waag.org Wed Sep 16 20:54:41 1998 Received: from guggenheim.org (smtpgate.guggenheim.org [205.232.24.31]) by A01.waag.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with SMTP id UAA15967 for ; Wed, 16 Sep 1998 20:54:40 +0200 Received: from SOHO-Message_Server by guggenheim.org with Novell_GroupWise; Wed, 16 Sep 1998 14:52:01 -0400 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.2 Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 14:51:42 -0400 From: "Jon C. Ippolito" To: tabody@waag.org Cc: cschmuckli@guggenheim.org, Jmereness@guggenheim.org, Justin@LiveOnLine.net Subject: TAbody: updates to outline of new york event Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by A01.waag.org id UAA15968 Here are some updates to the outline I distributed a few days ago: * I have received slides from Vernon which I am digitizing and sending to Shu Lea for her to make Web pages. Although it is now too late to incorporate other offline materials, if you have urls you would like Kimberly to visit during your presentation please e-mail them to me and I will check for firewall/plugin issues. (Lisa has already done so. Jennifer? Jennifer? Sandy?) * We are planning a dry run of the conferencing/Web server software this Saturday at 2 pm New York time, with the New York panelists and whoever is available in Amsterdam and Banff. It is important that the technical staffs in all three locations get the technology up and running BEFORE that time, so that the panelists don't waste time waiting around. We want to give Lisa, Kimberly, and Shu Lea a chance to try out their moderating styles under combat conditions. * Given that the time immediately before the event may be occupied with working out technical kinks, I would like to invite the New York panelists to an early dinner afterward--around 5 pm. (That is, if viewing sagittal sections of the Visible Man on 75 projection cubes doesn't spoil your appetite....) We are starting to get excited in New York. Once Lisa and I have had a chance to review the order of speakers we'll post our thoughts on that. jon office: Guggenheim Museum 575 Broadway, 3rd floor New York, NY 10012-4233 tel (212) 423-3837 fax (212) 941-0590