Lecture 7A Body and Mind augmented

“The selfp-proclaimed surrealist may be long gone, but they are not yet through us. Their projects echo through a proliferation of artworks over the last ten years that uses biology as either medium or subset to signal significant cultural shifts caused by alterations in our ideas of identity, nature, and environment.” (William Myers, 2015)

Meaning:

• surrealism connects to comtemporary artistic experiments especially artworks that had been influenced by “post-human” thinking

  • E.g. Cyborg Manifesto and How we become post-human

• Identity that is not biologically-determined/ more fluid sense of boundaries

  • E.g. Non-binary identification, gay men who aren’t top/bottom

Bio artists… are cast as interpreters of cultural transformation, ……. To assign meaning (William Myers, 2015)

Like journalists formulating the first draft of history but using aesthetic experience as language

Surrealism - Automatism and the Subconscious

• 20th century movement that I formatted new media art

• Surrealism originated as a literary movement

• French writer and poet Andre Breton wrote the first Surrealist Manifestox in 1924

• Automatism: the outpouring of the subconsciousness

• Informed by contemporary developments in psychology

• Saw rationality as a force of oppression

Surrealist Beliefs

• surrealist think mind and body are not separate

• Hoped that creative acts could move the mind away from reflexive reliance on reason — like mind altering technique

• Use Freud to analyze unconscious symbolic content of own works

Examples of Surrealism

• Fuji writing tapping into unconsciousness

• Battle of the Fishes (1926)

The Uncanny (1919) Sigmund Freud

• Freud took insights from na earlier paper titled psychology of the Uncanny (1906) written by German psychiatrist Ernst Jenthsch, and expanded them in his own 1919 piece

• Doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive, or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate….excite in the spectator the feeling that automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary appearance of animation

• telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton

• Two themes in the Sandman are related to uncanny: conflation and madness

Why are lifelike dolls uncanny?

• The uncanny is repressed beliefs made visible - Sigmund Freud

• E.g.

  • A child wishes her dolls were actual persons

  • Familiar wish resurfaced when she saw a doll that was too lifelike

  • Terrifying because it is something we once knew well but forced out of our minds

  • As adult, she repressed that wish as being irrational

Freud on “The Uncanny”

• Uncanny is the involuntary return of once familiar but repressed fears

  • E.g. the child’s dread in relation to its castration-complex

• It is a compulsion ( and is therefore related to neurosis)

• Consider not only childish beliefs but also beliefs that society as a whole once held but since “out grown”

• When these return they may also evoke uncanny feeling

  • E.g. superstition you could wish death upon somebody

  • Fear dead could be reanimated

Unheimich (German)

Uncanny/unhomely

Gregory Crewdson Untitled (2002)

Artworks evoke uncannily

Picinni’s hyperrealist sculptures

• She wants to help us confront uncanny feeling when human-animal boundary has been crossed

• Her work is ultimately about how we feel about difference

• Human-animal, living-inanimate, normal-monstrous

• She called her work “anti-xenophobic”

• She also said she is creating myths (in the spirit of Haraway)