Gravitational Aesthetics
Julijonas Urbonas 2009
Paper presented at ISEA2009, the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Belfast, UK. August 29, 2009
Department of Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, London, UK
Despite its apparent self-explanatory and inconspicuous nature, gravity influences us— our physical and intellectual selves— to such an extent that it is unimaginable we could have evolved the way we have without it. Gravity has always been burdening and restricting living beings, thus compelling humans to develop technologies to counter or negotiate the gravitational force. Therefore gravity has been a key element of perception and a fulcrum of human’s progress or advancement, which has witnessed a great variety of inventions, from the pragmatic to the poetic, from our gravity-defying upright stance to space travel in zero gravity. Most importantly, as far as this article is concerned, it also has a wholly original and largely unstudied aesthetic, upon which g-design*, a unique design paradigm, is constructed in the end of the text.
g-Design approaches humans’ psychological, bodily, and technological negotiation with gravity as a creative practice and designers’ critical base. The introduction of such original design field celebrates the eclectic marriage of choreography, locomotion engineering and embodied philosophy. Acknowledging the aesthetic potential of gravity-wise technologies to set humans in motion (or stasis), the design is concerned with such choreography’s effect upon our perception, the senses, and the imagination.
Vital gravity
Consider the human species’ attainment of upright posture as a rudimentary event in such gravity-defined progress. This development, it is widely claimed, gave rise to the unprecedented features of the human, such as self-awareness, intentionality, language and intelligence. Once we stood up, we were able to possess the gaze of an upright being, giving us a wider and farther view and thus the habit of planning; by freeing the lungs we became free to develop our vocalising system and thus speech-language. Finally, having freed up our hands, we started modifying and playing around with our environment, inventing tools to be able to understand the latter better, harness or alter it for human needs. In other words, by erecting or raising the body from the ground we literally drew the line of our evolution. American philosopher David Wills, quoting French anthropologist Andre Leroi Gourhan, writes in his book Dorsality: “standing upright the simian turned anthropoid and, in so doing, immediately turned technological” (Wills 2008: 8). Instead of considering the human nature as being an opposite of technology, Wills suggests we imagine an originary overlapping of nature and technology that begins with the dorsal turn (straightening of our back)—“a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision” (Wills 2008: 280). If technology is an integral part of the human or some kind of “vertebral articulation”, we must not forget that the impetus for such ‘articulated’ development is the very adaptation to the terrestrial environment governed by the laws of gravity. Little by little, humans have been elevating themselves from the gravity-driven ground: once, man stood up, ran up, took off and flew away, reaching escape velocity and escaping Earth’s gravity field.
Creative gravity
Today, because the question of gravity is no longer inexorably tied to evolution, we create and enjoy a myriad of gravity-related activities. It should come as no surprise that most of them provide unprecedented forms, modes, and modalities of perception, with their accompanying aesthetic qualities, since the state of gravity, which has been present and constant ever since, might today be altered in unseen ways. One of the key drives of technological development in our negotiations with gravity includes the pursuit of lightness and balance, manifesting itself in technologies like powered exoskeletons, orbiting satellites, or even muscular fatigue blockers that create the possibility of new types of locomotion, and with it new types of perception. As a result, novel ways of orientation and navigation, and perception of the surroundings from new points of view come into being. That is to say, locomotion conditions what can be seen, attended, and experienced. Psychologist James Jerome Gibson, well known for his investigation of the interplay between perception and locomotion, says:
"Locomotion does not only depend on perception but perception depends on locomotion inasmuch as a moving point of observation is necessary for any adequate acquaintance of environment. So we must perceive in order to move, but also move in order to perceive." (Gibson 1986: 223)
Think, for instance, of how pedestrians and drivers have different perspectives of the same object – such as the urban space. The former ‘read’ the space with their feet, experiencing the surroundings with the whole of their body. The latter perceive it, as French thinker Paul Virilio would say, like a road movie; here, bodily awareness of distance is absent compared to that of the pedestrian, while the visual field is more expanded, but less focused when travelling by car rather than on foot. Accessibility of the environment differs as well: the automobile is constrained by its very ‘infrastructure’, e.g. the roads and fast speed, thus having no access to the tactile quality of soil or trees, for instance. Presumably, powered exoskeletons—wearable vehicles of sorts—will combine the perceptual features of both cases. Or, take less pragmatic locomotion like thrill rides, particularly the roller coaster, where riders submit their bodies to the unique language of spatiotemporal narratives, perceiving a peculiar kinetic world of its own.
Furthermore, these technologies not only choreograph the ways we inhabit and perceive space, but can also alter or at least question our very nature. For instance, whilst the kinaesthetic composition of the roller coaster, such as the resonance in our innards, engages sensorial modes that are usually defined as being of an interior nature, in other words, belonging to the sensorium responsible for self-awareness, it penetrates the skin as the border of the body. The boundaries between inner and exterior perception are then blurred, as though viscera acquired its own sight. Even more strikingly, some pilots undergo an out-of-body experience, suffering the illusion that they are sitting on the wing of their aircraft watching themselves in the cockpit, thus challenging the notion of the situated self. If it is not convincing enough, take the Barany chair. This simple chair, named for the Hungarian physiologist Robert Barany, is a device used for aerospace physiology training. The subject is placed in the chair, blindfolded, and then spun around the vertical axis while keeping his head upright or tilted forward or to the side. This forces the subject to experience the Coriolis illusion, which causes nausea and ‘acrobatic’ disorientation, an extreme misperception of the position of one’s body. The chair is used to demonstrate spatial disorientation effects, proving that the vestibular system is not to be trusted in flight, thus implying that the human body is questioned to be obsolete in the face of the technology. Pilots are taught to rely on their flight instruments instead; in other words, the chair makes technological substitution of the body possible. The device causes a change within the body in at least two ways: the body is ‘removed’ during the flight, while flight control instruments are incorporated into it. Yet the device also enhances embodied power when used in motion sickness therapy.
In general, any new relationship with gravity and, simultaneously, new type of locomotion reveal certain qualities of our perceived world that were never experienced before. That, in turn, prompts specific criticism and appreciation. The unique beauty, I’d suggest, lies in the dynamic interplay between gravity, the body—itself the very product of gravity— and those gravity-wise technologies. Being the core impetus of such interaction, the human body might be seen as a living motor, or, in Paul Virilio’s words, “energized body, that is a body with reflexes and anticipatory qualities, a body that is constantly in-becoming” (Virilio and Armitage 2001: 62). The motor that has got the capacity to reconcile with, appropriate, and defy gravity, but also has the desire to do so. What calls for such likening is, firstly, the body’s locomotive ‘function’, but also its capability to modify its mobility or motility properties, adapt and learn, sense, and extend its perception. Virilio observes the beauty of the vital bodily dynamism revealing itself in the “beautiful motor” of dancer’s body. What he means by speaking of dynamism is not a quantitative, but a qualitative and aesthetic characteristic. Having this as a starting point, I assume that fastness, strength and agility—the qualities of athletic performance—are not appropriate criteria for this paper’s objective of defining the gravitational aesthetic. Instead, I address those aesthetic qualities that let us reinterpret or rebalance our relationship with the burdensomeness exerted by gravity, or revitalise it and give it a new meaning.
Fatal gravity
While gravity-related technological development (or progress?) brings unseen aesthetic vistas, it also fetches regressive effects. As it comes to athletic enhancement or ‘comfortisation’ of gravitational burdens loaded upon the body, the principal objective becomes getting rid of gravity. Ultimately, elimination of gravity also ‘eliminates’ the body, which is threatened to become (or to be treated as) a trivial attachment to the self. In this context, the human being loses bodily richness, coming to sensory deprivation (or discrimination?), and becoming increasingly passive and inertial. It has both perceptual and organic dimensions. In microgravity, as a direct example, astronauts suffer disorientation and motion sickness, but also their body is decaying** due to the lack of gravity. Moreover, please note that escape velocity, a prerequisite to entering gravity-free space, also empowers telecommunications (orbiting satellites)—the realm of telepresence, electromagnetic substitution of the body.
Those ‘body-atrophying’ technologies include, but are not limited to, design approaches like mechanical substitution (e.g. the wheel versus legs), cybernetic disembodiment (the belief in “information over physical matter”), biotechnological motility (e.g. stamina-energising pharmaceuticals, such as steroids, amphetamines, anti-obesity drugs, muscular fatigue blockers), and ideological discrimination (sensory neglecting, e.g. preoccupation with the visual media, aka ocularcentrism).
Recall those perceptual constraints of the automobile, for example. Once the wheel ‘amputated’ our legs to reduce them to ‘pedal pushers’, but recent development goes even further… tearing off the whole body. Bose’s super-stable automobile suspension is one of elementary examples. Thanks to the electromagnetic linear motors and a set of control algorithms used for damping, it makes the vehicle ideally stable whether you drive on a highway or off-road. Even the buttock, perhaps our softest part, the zone of comfort, is removed, losing every function, even its amortising utility. Challenging the very symbol of sedentarism, ‘smart’ suspension anticipates the time of post-sedentarism, introducing the whole-mindbody stasis!
There is no longer ‘gravitational journey’. Not merely because of the lack of physical ‘feedback’. The driver no longer needs to learn or to work on anticipative bodily knowledge for driving a car. Control is achieved comfortably and instantly, in a blink of the eye. The situation is similar with today’s stamina-energising pharmaceuticals, such as steroids or muscular fatigue blockers, which make the ‘control’ of one’s body accessible with just a swallowed ‘anti-g’ pill or a graft injection. That means there is no longer a need to become acquainted with one’s own body, thus the individual is alienated from himself/herself.
The body is cut, but, luckily, eviscerated eyeballs are left. However, bodily qualities do not simply disappear. The loss is offloaded onto visual perception. In fact, this foretells a not-so-happy future—sight is the only ‘channel’ to the world to be left. Are we not in the realm of kinaesthesia, where we experience the world through a range of senses anchored in corporal reality, the dimensions of which vision alone is incapable of apprehending? Sensory discrimination and preoccupation with sight does not only impoverish perception, but also alienates people from themselves. The future ‘one-eyed’ man will perceive environment and the self solely from the distance. Much like neuroscientist Oliver Sack’s patient Christina, aka the “disembodied lady” (Sacks 1998: 43), one of the very few people with lost proprioception – the sense of body. She recovers her own bodily functioning—or rather operating—by intensively monitoring her limbs visually. If the lights go out unannounced, she suddenly crumples to the floor, unable to budge until they come back on. Christina’s freedom of movements is, then, totally dependent on the field of view—her life is constrained within the illuminated space. Light gains a fundamentally vital importance. But doesn’t this case of ‘illuminism’ apply to able-bodied people in the light of body-atrophying technologies?
Moreover, the body’s job might be ‘offloaded’ onto the brain. “Cyborg is possible”, convinces Yoshiyuki Sankai, the professor of Tsukuba University of Japan (Youtube). Although “it is virtually impossible to create an artificial intelligence”, commenting on the exoskeleton HAL5 (Hybrid Assistive Limb), he considers it to be “the robot that has prospects to use the human brain itself” (Ibid). These mind-controlled means of transportation, being “at the frontier” of such cyborgian trend (Ibid), make the body a host, a living prosthesis to the machine. The driver is no longer free to think or dream. He or she now has to deal with the weight of thought!
g-Design
Given the vital and fatal aspects of gravity and its unique aesthetic potential, an alternative design approach is of great importance and urgency in the time when the body, itself the very product of gravity, is increasingly being atrophied, if not yet amputated, by technology and ocularcentrism. Responding to this challenge, this study, titled ‘Gravitational Aesthetics’, aims at constructing a specific design paradigm based on gravity’s vitality, that is, on its potential to set human beings in motion and keep them awake (it is hard to fall asleep in motion, isn't it? only sleepwalkers can walk or fall through a window, for example, asleep).
In criticising the increasingly prevailing technological trend, which threatens the body to become passive and lose its charms, the study envisions a reinterpretation of the ‘flesh-and-blood’ human being in the face of technological advancement. Not concerned with how this might play itself out in, for instance, amusement parks or fitness clubs (though informed by their aesthetic potential), this approach seeks to combine the aesthetics of dance and the technology of astronauts’ exercise instead. This is both an effort to celebrate the death of the gravitational body and the beginning of an undertaking to usher in its reinvention.
g-Design’s strategies include but are not limited to:
• Approaching the capacity of technology to affect humans’ movements as a creative focal field of design choreography.
• Using the concept of “the body as a living motor” or “thinking body” for the g-design Modulor. Rethinking ergonomics through the body’s capacities to anticipate, reconcile, appropriate, and learn.
• Energising and activating the body. Designing technologies that compensate for the lost weight or ‘side effects’ of sedentariness, inertia, passiveness, and sensory deprivation. Aesthetic simulation of gravity.
• Adapting choreography’s approach of appropriating the body to physical, psychological and cultural conditions or space to design methodology.
________________________________________________________
* Prefix “g” stands here as a conceptual link to g-force. In physics, g-force measures the net effect of the acceleration that an object actually experiences and the acceleration that gravity is trying to impart to it. The symbol g is properly written in lowercase and italic, to distinguish it from the symbol G, the gravitational constant, which is always written in uppercase; and from g, the symbol for gram, which is not italicised.
** For example, astronauts’ muscles and bones tend to gradually decay in microgravitational environment.
References
Clément, Gilles and K. Slenzka. Fundamentals of Space Biology: Research on Cells, Animals, and Plants in Space. Trans. El Segundo, Calif. : Microcosm ; c2006., 2006.
Gibson, James Jerome. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.
"Hybrid Assistive Limb® from Cyberdyne." 2008. Online video clip. YouTube. Accessed on 12 April 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynL8BCXih8U
Ingold, Tim. "Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet." Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004): 315.
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. Touchstone, 1998.
Virilio, Paul and Armitage, John. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. London : SAGE, 2001.
Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Posthumanities). University Of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Julijonas Urbonas 2009
Paper presented at ISEA2009, the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Belfast, UK. August 29, 2009
Department of Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, London, UK
Despite its apparent self-explanatory and inconspicuous nature, gravity influences us— our physical and intellectual selves— to such an extent that it is unimaginable we could have evolved the way we have without it. Gravity has always been burdening and restricting living beings, thus compelling humans to develop technologies to counter or negotiate the gravitational force. Therefore gravity has been a key element of perception and a fulcrum of human’s progress or advancement, which has witnessed a great variety of inventions, from the pragmatic to the poetic, from our gravity-defying upright stance to space travel in zero gravity. Most importantly, as far as this article is concerned, it also has a wholly original and largely unstudied aesthetic, upon which g-design*, a unique design paradigm, is constructed in the end of the text.
g-Design approaches humans’ psychological, bodily, and technological negotiation with gravity as a creative practice and designers’ critical base. The introduction of such original design field celebrates the eclectic marriage of choreography, locomotion engineering and embodied philosophy. Acknowledging the aesthetic potential of gravity-wise technologies to set humans in motion (or stasis), the design is concerned with such choreography’s effect upon our perception, the senses, and the imagination.
Vital gravity
Consider the human species’ attainment of upright posture as a rudimentary event in such gravity-defined progress. This development, it is widely claimed, gave rise to the unprecedented features of the human, such as self-awareness, intentionality, language and intelligence. Once we stood up, we were able to possess the gaze of an upright being, giving us a wider and farther view and thus the habit of planning; by freeing the lungs we became free to develop our vocalising system and thus speech-language. Finally, having freed up our hands, we started modifying and playing around with our environment, inventing tools to be able to understand the latter better, harness or alter it for human needs. In other words, by erecting or raising the body from the ground we literally drew the line of our evolution. American philosopher David Wills, quoting French anthropologist Andre Leroi Gourhan, writes in his book Dorsality: “standing upright the simian turned anthropoid and, in so doing, immediately turned technological” (Wills 2008: 8). Instead of considering the human nature as being an opposite of technology, Wills suggests we imagine an originary overlapping of nature and technology that begins with the dorsal turn (straightening of our back)—“a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision” (Wills 2008: 280). If technology is an integral part of the human or some kind of “vertebral articulation”, we must not forget that the impetus for such ‘articulated’ development is the very adaptation to the terrestrial environment governed by the laws of gravity. Little by little, humans have been elevating themselves from the gravity-driven ground: once, man stood up, ran up, took off and flew away, reaching escape velocity and escaping Earth’s gravity field.
Creative gravity
Today, because the question of gravity is no longer inexorably tied to evolution, we create and enjoy a myriad of gravity-related activities. It should come as no surprise that most of them provide unprecedented forms, modes, and modalities of perception, with their accompanying aesthetic qualities, since the state of gravity, which has been present and constant ever since, might today be altered in unseen ways. One of the key drives of technological development in our negotiations with gravity includes the pursuit of lightness and balance, manifesting itself in technologies like powered exoskeletons, orbiting satellites, or even muscular fatigue blockers that create the possibility of new types of locomotion, and with it new types of perception. As a result, novel ways of orientation and navigation, and perception of the surroundings from new points of view come into being. That is to say, locomotion conditions what can be seen, attended, and experienced. Psychologist James Jerome Gibson, well known for his investigation of the interplay between perception and locomotion, says:
"Locomotion does not only depend on perception but perception depends on locomotion inasmuch as a moving point of observation is necessary for any adequate acquaintance of environment. So we must perceive in order to move, but also move in order to perceive." (Gibson 1986: 223)
Think, for instance, of how pedestrians and drivers have different perspectives of the same object – such as the urban space. The former ‘read’ the space with their feet, experiencing the surroundings with the whole of their body. The latter perceive it, as French thinker Paul Virilio would say, like a road movie; here, bodily awareness of distance is absent compared to that of the pedestrian, while the visual field is more expanded, but less focused when travelling by car rather than on foot. Accessibility of the environment differs as well: the automobile is constrained by its very ‘infrastructure’, e.g. the roads and fast speed, thus having no access to the tactile quality of soil or trees, for instance. Presumably, powered exoskeletons—wearable vehicles of sorts—will combine the perceptual features of both cases. Or, take less pragmatic locomotion like thrill rides, particularly the roller coaster, where riders submit their bodies to the unique language of spatiotemporal narratives, perceiving a peculiar kinetic world of its own.
Furthermore, these technologies not only choreograph the ways we inhabit and perceive space, but can also alter or at least question our very nature. For instance, whilst the kinaesthetic composition of the roller coaster, such as the resonance in our innards, engages sensorial modes that are usually defined as being of an interior nature, in other words, belonging to the sensorium responsible for self-awareness, it penetrates the skin as the border of the body. The boundaries between inner and exterior perception are then blurred, as though viscera acquired its own sight. Even more strikingly, some pilots undergo an out-of-body experience, suffering the illusion that they are sitting on the wing of their aircraft watching themselves in the cockpit, thus challenging the notion of the situated self. If it is not convincing enough, take the Barany chair. This simple chair, named for the Hungarian physiologist Robert Barany, is a device used for aerospace physiology training. The subject is placed in the chair, blindfolded, and then spun around the vertical axis while keeping his head upright or tilted forward or to the side. This forces the subject to experience the Coriolis illusion, which causes nausea and ‘acrobatic’ disorientation, an extreme misperception of the position of one’s body. The chair is used to demonstrate spatial disorientation effects, proving that the vestibular system is not to be trusted in flight, thus implying that the human body is questioned to be obsolete in the face of the technology. Pilots are taught to rely on their flight instruments instead; in other words, the chair makes technological substitution of the body possible. The device causes a change within the body in at least two ways: the body is ‘removed’ during the flight, while flight control instruments are incorporated into it. Yet the device also enhances embodied power when used in motion sickness therapy.
In general, any new relationship with gravity and, simultaneously, new type of locomotion reveal certain qualities of our perceived world that were never experienced before. That, in turn, prompts specific criticism and appreciation. The unique beauty, I’d suggest, lies in the dynamic interplay between gravity, the body—itself the very product of gravity— and those gravity-wise technologies. Being the core impetus of such interaction, the human body might be seen as a living motor, or, in Paul Virilio’s words, “energized body, that is a body with reflexes and anticipatory qualities, a body that is constantly in-becoming” (Virilio and Armitage 2001: 62). The motor that has got the capacity to reconcile with, appropriate, and defy gravity, but also has the desire to do so. What calls for such likening is, firstly, the body’s locomotive ‘function’, but also its capability to modify its mobility or motility properties, adapt and learn, sense, and extend its perception. Virilio observes the beauty of the vital bodily dynamism revealing itself in the “beautiful motor” of dancer’s body. What he means by speaking of dynamism is not a quantitative, but a qualitative and aesthetic characteristic. Having this as a starting point, I assume that fastness, strength and agility—the qualities of athletic performance—are not appropriate criteria for this paper’s objective of defining the gravitational aesthetic. Instead, I address those aesthetic qualities that let us reinterpret or rebalance our relationship with the burdensomeness exerted by gravity, or revitalise it and give it a new meaning.
Fatal gravity
While gravity-related technological development (or progress?) brings unseen aesthetic vistas, it also fetches regressive effects. As it comes to athletic enhancement or ‘comfortisation’ of gravitational burdens loaded upon the body, the principal objective becomes getting rid of gravity. Ultimately, elimination of gravity also ‘eliminates’ the body, which is threatened to become (or to be treated as) a trivial attachment to the self. In this context, the human being loses bodily richness, coming to sensory deprivation (or discrimination?), and becoming increasingly passive and inertial. It has both perceptual and organic dimensions. In microgravity, as a direct example, astronauts suffer disorientation and motion sickness, but also their body is decaying** due to the lack of gravity. Moreover, please note that escape velocity, a prerequisite to entering gravity-free space, also empowers telecommunications (orbiting satellites)—the realm of telepresence, electromagnetic substitution of the body.
Those ‘body-atrophying’ technologies include, but are not limited to, design approaches like mechanical substitution (e.g. the wheel versus legs), cybernetic disembodiment (the belief in “information over physical matter”), biotechnological motility (e.g. stamina-energising pharmaceuticals, such as steroids, amphetamines, anti-obesity drugs, muscular fatigue blockers), and ideological discrimination (sensory neglecting, e.g. preoccupation with the visual media, aka ocularcentrism).
Recall those perceptual constraints of the automobile, for example. Once the wheel ‘amputated’ our legs to reduce them to ‘pedal pushers’, but recent development goes even further… tearing off the whole body. Bose’s super-stable automobile suspension is one of elementary examples. Thanks to the electromagnetic linear motors and a set of control algorithms used for damping, it makes the vehicle ideally stable whether you drive on a highway or off-road. Even the buttock, perhaps our softest part, the zone of comfort, is removed, losing every function, even its amortising utility. Challenging the very symbol of sedentarism, ‘smart’ suspension anticipates the time of post-sedentarism, introducing the whole-mindbody stasis!
There is no longer ‘gravitational journey’. Not merely because of the lack of physical ‘feedback’. The driver no longer needs to learn or to work on anticipative bodily knowledge for driving a car. Control is achieved comfortably and instantly, in a blink of the eye. The situation is similar with today’s stamina-energising pharmaceuticals, such as steroids or muscular fatigue blockers, which make the ‘control’ of one’s body accessible with just a swallowed ‘anti-g’ pill or a graft injection. That means there is no longer a need to become acquainted with one’s own body, thus the individual is alienated from himself/herself.
The body is cut, but, luckily, eviscerated eyeballs are left. However, bodily qualities do not simply disappear. The loss is offloaded onto visual perception. In fact, this foretells a not-so-happy future—sight is the only ‘channel’ to the world to be left. Are we not in the realm of kinaesthesia, where we experience the world through a range of senses anchored in corporal reality, the dimensions of which vision alone is incapable of apprehending? Sensory discrimination and preoccupation with sight does not only impoverish perception, but also alienates people from themselves. The future ‘one-eyed’ man will perceive environment and the self solely from the distance. Much like neuroscientist Oliver Sack’s patient Christina, aka the “disembodied lady” (Sacks 1998: 43), one of the very few people with lost proprioception – the sense of body. She recovers her own bodily functioning—or rather operating—by intensively monitoring her limbs visually. If the lights go out unannounced, she suddenly crumples to the floor, unable to budge until they come back on. Christina’s freedom of movements is, then, totally dependent on the field of view—her life is constrained within the illuminated space. Light gains a fundamentally vital importance. But doesn’t this case of ‘illuminism’ apply to able-bodied people in the light of body-atrophying technologies?
Moreover, the body’s job might be ‘offloaded’ onto the brain. “Cyborg is possible”, convinces Yoshiyuki Sankai, the professor of Tsukuba University of Japan (Youtube). Although “it is virtually impossible to create an artificial intelligence”, commenting on the exoskeleton HAL5 (Hybrid Assistive Limb), he considers it to be “the robot that has prospects to use the human brain itself” (Ibid). These mind-controlled means of transportation, being “at the frontier” of such cyborgian trend (Ibid), make the body a host, a living prosthesis to the machine. The driver is no longer free to think or dream. He or she now has to deal with the weight of thought!
g-Design
Given the vital and fatal aspects of gravity and its unique aesthetic potential, an alternative design approach is of great importance and urgency in the time when the body, itself the very product of gravity, is increasingly being atrophied, if not yet amputated, by technology and ocularcentrism. Responding to this challenge, this study, titled ‘Gravitational Aesthetics’, aims at constructing a specific design paradigm based on gravity’s vitality, that is, on its potential to set human beings in motion and keep them awake (it is hard to fall asleep in motion, isn't it? only sleepwalkers can walk or fall through a window, for example, asleep).
In criticising the increasingly prevailing technological trend, which threatens the body to become passive and lose its charms, the study envisions a reinterpretation of the ‘flesh-and-blood’ human being in the face of technological advancement. Not concerned with how this might play itself out in, for instance, amusement parks or fitness clubs (though informed by their aesthetic potential), this approach seeks to combine the aesthetics of dance and the technology of astronauts’ exercise instead. This is both an effort to celebrate the death of the gravitational body and the beginning of an undertaking to usher in its reinvention.
g-Design’s strategies include but are not limited to:
• Approaching the capacity of technology to affect humans’ movements as a creative focal field of design choreography.
• Using the concept of “the body as a living motor” or “thinking body” for the g-design Modulor. Rethinking ergonomics through the body’s capacities to anticipate, reconcile, appropriate, and learn.
• Energising and activating the body. Designing technologies that compensate for the lost weight or ‘side effects’ of sedentariness, inertia, passiveness, and sensory deprivation. Aesthetic simulation of gravity.
• Adapting choreography’s approach of appropriating the body to physical, psychological and cultural conditions or space to design methodology.
________________________________________________________
* Prefix “g” stands here as a conceptual link to g-force. In physics, g-force measures the net effect of the acceleration that an object actually experiences and the acceleration that gravity is trying to impart to it. The symbol g is properly written in lowercase and italic, to distinguish it from the symbol G, the gravitational constant, which is always written in uppercase; and from g, the symbol for gram, which is not italicised.
** For example, astronauts’ muscles and bones tend to gradually decay in microgravitational environment.
References
Clément, Gilles and K. Slenzka. Fundamentals of Space Biology: Research on Cells, Animals, and Plants in Space. Trans. El Segundo, Calif. : Microcosm ; c2006., 2006.
Gibson, James Jerome. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.
"Hybrid Assistive Limb® from Cyberdyne." 2008. Online video clip. YouTube. Accessed on 12 April 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynL8BCXih8U
Ingold, Tim. "Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet." Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004): 315.
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. Touchstone, 1998.
Virilio, Paul and Armitage, John. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. London : SAGE, 2001.
Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Posthumanities). University Of Minnesota Press, 2008.