• Stelarc The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera
• Joanna Zylinska Digital Flow: Photography on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
• Gary Hall Free, Libre, Liquid Media
• Matthew Sellars Capturing the Quantum Image
• Darren Tofts Beyond Technological Smartness: the Rise of the p-Zombie
• Nina Sellars Almost Seeing: the Anatomical Body Between Light and Shadow
• Kit Wise Digital Media, Art and the Overexposed City
• Melissa Miles Light, Presence and the Camera: On the Matter and Mutability of Photography
  

Flesh is circulating. Faces are detached and stitched onto other bodies, becoming third faces. Cadaver limbs are animated by other brains. Organs are extracted from one body and implanted into another. The blood flowing in my body today might be circulating in your body tomorrow. Ova are fertilized with sperm that were once frozen. Cryogenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. Stem cells replicated in-vitro are reinjected and repair the body in-vivo. Prosthetic parts augment damaged and diseased bodies. Paralyzed bodies are machine actuated. Dead bodies can be preserved forever with plastination whilst comatose bodies can be sustained indefinitely on life-support systems. Chimeric entities can be now engineered in the lab. The dead, the un-dead, the not yet born and the partially living now exist simultaneously. Organs might be grown and might be 3D printed. Organs will be in excess. Organs will be awaiting bodies. Organs without bodies.

Digital technology has played a significant role in the transformation of commercial and art photography: witness the convergence of different media resulting in mobile phones doubling as still and video cameras; or the proliferation of photo sharing websites such as Flickr, where amateur photographers can post their portfolios next to those of seasoned professionals. The context for this paper is provided by this transformation of the photographic medium and practice in the digital age. However, its aim is to explore deeper anxieties over the challenge to our established notions of art, culture and the media that digitisation has posed. It is also to query some of the ways of protecting these established notions and values via multiple strategies of remembrance, archiving and data storage. Although I will look at the issue of digitisation through the lens of photographic arts – Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group Archive, Tacita Dean’s Floh – my concerns in this paper are socio-cultural and political as much as they are aesthetic.

This talk will present a series of performative media projects or ‘media gifts’. Operating at the intersections of art, media and philosophy, these projects are gifts in that they are part of the ‘academic gift economy’ which circulates work for free rather than as market commodities. They are performative in that they are instances of media that endeavour to produce the effects they name or things of which they speak. The particular ‘media gift’ my talk will focus on is Liquid Books (http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/FrontPage). This consists of a series of digital ‘books’ that are available in an ‘open access’ format, which means that they are free for anyone to read online, on a worldwide basis. However, they are also based on the principles of ‘open editing’and ‘free content’. In other words, these books are ‘liquid’ in the sense that users can continually rewrite, remix and reinvent them. As a result the Liquid Books project raises some challenging questions for our ideas of the author, editor, artist, designer, publisher and ‘the work’.

Quantum mechanics holds that there is a fundamental limitation in the process of recording an image. Images are created by measuring aspects of the light, recording the resulting information and then displaying it in a way that can be interpreted by an observer. The uncertainty principle states that we cannot measure simultaneously all aspects of the light with infinite precision. The object and the observer cannot be separated, with the very act of observing any one characteristic of the light unavoidably altering the others. In this paper I discuss my research team’s work on “stopping light”, a new recording process that sidesteps the uncertainty principle by postponing the measurement of the light until the final viewing of the image. The concept is to map the light onto the quantum states of a crystal, effectively stopping the light. To view the image we reverse the time evolution of the crystal’s quantum states.

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What happens when mediated agents obtain agency and operate beyond our control? From the myth of Prometheus to the “mind children” of Hans Moravec, the idea of artificial agents has both beleaguered and fascinated the human imagination. This paper will explore a micro-history of this fascination and its potential realization in the contemporary philosophical concept of the p-zombie, the “philosophical zombie” of cognitive science, developed as an acid test for distinguishing between a human and its artificial replicant. The paper will ground this idea of agency beyond human control in terms of the most recent series of generative computer animations by the media artist Murray McKeich. The title of this series is called, appropriately, p-zombie.

How does light affect what we see and experience in relation to the anatomical body, and how are these experiences articulated through image? With the magnification of sight and intensification of light, made possible through various technological advancements, it has allowed us to view what had previously lain invisible in the anatomical body. But just as importantly, if not more so, they have also provided us new ways to conceptualise these recently discovered structures, both intellectually and ideologically. This paper focuses on the role that light plays in the translation of flesh into image, presenting light as an instigator rather than a passive illuminator of anatomical knowledge, and thus also a transmitter of ideology with regard to the body, identity and subjectivity. The paper will discuss my recent installation ‘The Anatomy of Optics and Light’ (2009) using the artwork as a lens through which to explore and evaluate these ideas.

Popular culture is strewn with visions of the urban spaces of the future. How do artists of our time navigate this territory? This paper addresses Paul Virilio’s notion of the ‘overexposed city’ through contemporary Australian art practice, in order to investigate the current cultural imagining of the ‘future spaces’ of the city. In one sense updating the cliché that a painting offers a window on the world, this paper substitutes recent art works by contemporary Australian artists for Virilio’s ‘door without a city’. In attempting to discern the status of urban architecture in relation to the exponential development of technology, Virilio identifies ‘a transmutation of representation’ that he discusses in terms of film: here, more than anywhere, advanced technologies have converged to create a synthetic space-time’. The contemporary Australian art works serve to chart this filmic mediation or ‘transmutation’ from a geographical to a temporal representation of space as motion, where ‘the living and the living dead merge to the point of delirium’.

Light has long served as a key myth of presence in photography. As an invisible, external agent, light yields ontological ground to objects, and forges an apparently direct link between those objects and the photographic emulsion. Foreclosed in these photological schemes are the fugitive, mutable and differential qualities of light. By drawing on Derrida’s notion of the heliotropic character of metaphor and the recent pinhole photographs of the Japanese photographer, Tokihiro Sato, this paper will rethink notions of light and presence in an attempt to open up the practice and theory of photography to more dynamic modes of understanding.

Stelarc has performed with a Third Hand, a Virtual Body and an Exoskeleton 6-legged walking robot. He is surgically constructing and stem cell growing an Ear On Arm which will be internet enabled. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Laws by Monash University. He is currently Chair in Performance Art, School of Arts, Brunel University, London. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the MARCS Lab, University of Western Sydney. Stelarc’s artwork is represented by the Scott Livesy Galleries in Melbourne. www.stelarc.va.com.au Second Life site- http://tr.im/jFGN

Dr Joanna Zylinska is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of three books: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Zylinska combines her philosophical writings with photographic art practice. www.joannazylinska.net

Prof. Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University , UK. He is author of Culture in Bits (2002) and Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008). He is also founding co-editor of the open access journal Culture Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net) and co-founder of the Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, and The Oxford Literary Review. www.garyhall.info

Dr Matthew Sellars is a senior research fellow in the Laser Physics Centre, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University. His research interests centre on quantum measurement and quantum information processing using optically active ions in crystals. He has published in numerous journals including Physical Review Letters and Journal of the Optical Society of America. His work on stopping light for over a second was voted by the Chinese Academy of Science as one of the top 10 international scientific achievements in 2005.

Assoc. Prof. Darren Tofts is Associate Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology. His publications include Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (1997), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (2003) and Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (2005)

Nina Sellars is an artist and PhD student in Drawing at the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University, where she also lectures in Anatomical Drawing for the Medical and Art Faculties. She has trained and worked as a prosector (dissector of cadavers for medical display) and often collaborates with scientists and artists on cross-disciplinary projects. Her artwork uses drawing, photography and installation, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2008 Sellars was an invited speaker at the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Coventry University, UK, and the Bellevue Arts Centre, USA. www.ninasellars.com

Kit Wise is an artist, art writer and curator, and has published over 50 book chapters, articles, reviews and catalogue essays since 2003 including texts for Australian and international art journals such as Artlink, unMagazine and Frieze. A graduate from Oxford University and Royal College of Arts, with an MFA in Sculpture, Wise has travelled and researched extensively overseas assisted by a Wingate Rome Scholarship in Fine Art, a Boise Travel Scholarship, administered by the Slade School of Fine Art, and Australia Council grants. He is currently Acting Head, and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, in the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University as well as the Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours Course Coordinator.

Dr Melissa Miles is based at the Department of Theory of Art & Design, Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. Her research on photography, light and visuality has been published in numerous journals including The Journal of Visual Culture, Word and Image and Southern Review, and forthcoming papers will appear in Photographies and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. Melissa’s essays on diverse aspects of contemporary art also appear regularly in the Australian arts press. Her book, The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light, was published by Australian Scholarly Press in 2008.

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