Becoming Dragon
From borderlandsHacklabWiki
Contents |
Introduction
As the project continues, the questions are developing and focusing... Becoming Dragon New Summary August7
Can one really become a dragon? Or a neko? With the rapid pace of advancing technology, how far are we from the day in which instead of mere Sex Reassignment Surgery, we have access to Species Reassignment Surgery? I plan to investigate this question in a few stages. First, I will investigate the usage of synthetic worlds, using Second Life as a platform, for fulfilling the Real Life Experience (RLE) requirement that transgender people face before they are allowed to get Gender Confirmation Procedures, aka, Sex Reassignment Surgery. To do so, I will engage in a 365 hour immersive performance in Second Life.
During this time, I will also be researching synthetic biology and biotechnologies that may facilitate such bodily changes. Why does the promise of biotech, absolute control of the body, not extend to transgender people? Is it because that promise is only a myth produced to sell products? Does the biotech industry actually affect people's lives, or does it only make promises like feeding the world and then never fulfill them? After the durational performance, I intend to continue to explore and experiment with biotechnologies such as tissue cultures, implants and prosesthetic devices. Ultimately, I plan to explore Body Hacking practices in use today, to find out how far we are from DIY species modifications like fur growth.
Throughout all of this, I will be going through my actual chemically assisted transformation, Hormone Replacement Therapy, and writing about that process as well, and creating photographic documentation, which you can read about at my blog Techno Tranny Slut.com
Currently, we are working on Stage 1 of this project, which you can read about here: Becoming Dragon: Stage 1
This project is receiving support from CRCA, CalIT2, UCIRA, Ars Virtua and The B.A.N.G. lab.
Beginning Hormones, a Prelude to Becoming Dragon
http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2008/06/30/beginning-hormones-a-prelude-to-becoming-dragon/
Theoretical Inspirations
"For the critical performer, exploring and interrogating the wanderings and manipulations of the numerous electronic dopplegängers within the many theaters of the virtual should be of primary significance."
- The Electronic Disturbance, Ch 4. The Recombinant Theater and the Performative Matrix, Critical Art Ensemble
“A new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians, will arise to invade or evacuate Empire… These barbaric deployments work on human relations in general, but we can recognize them today first and foremost in corporeal relations and configurations of gender and sexuality. Conventional norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders are increasingly open to challenge and transformation. Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies.”
- Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
"To make something inoperative is to open it to another usage. Can we think another usage of genitals? Can we think another usage of the body? ... Can we conceive of another usage of the organs of the body? This is the central political question, the ability of thinking another usage of human bodies, human gesture, human behavior, human work."
- Giorgio Agamben, seminar in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, at the European Graduate School, Summer 2007
"The becoming-woman serves as a point of reference, and eventually as a screen for other types of becoming (example: becoming-child as in Schumann, becoming-animal as in Kafka, becoming-vegetable as in Novalis, becoming-mineral as in Beckett)... There is no such thing as woman per se! No maternal pole, no eternal feminine... The man/woman opposition serves to establish the social order before class and caste conflicts. Inversely, whatever shatters norms, whatever breaks from the established order, is related to homosexuality or a becoming-animal or a becoming-woman."
- Felix Guattari, Becoming-Woman
Project Summary
I am interested in exploring the question of how contemporary technology can facilitate the development of somatic practices beyond our current conceptions of male, female and human. This project will explore three main technologies:
- MMO's, in particular Second Life and
- biotechnologies such as tissue development and implants, gender confirmation surgery and prosthetics
- body hacking practices, low cost, diy body modification
to investigate how these technologies not only expand the capacity to imagine and conceptualize new subjectivities, but to actually develop practices and skills within these new subjectivities.
More Themselves, In Game in the Flow
For example, many players in MMORPG's describe the experience of feeling '"more themselves" in the avatar persona than they do in real life'[1]. I propose that this experience has a strong relation to the feeling expressed by transgender people that their "true selves" do not correspond to their bodies [2] and that of performers such as clowns.
"I feel more like myself as a clown, when I put on face paint, than I ever have in my life."
- Private Pipi, Boredom Patrol of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army
"No sooner do I get upon the stage than all my self-protective armour peels away from me and I am a recording instrument as sensitive as a mimosa plant. There is nothing I cannot feel and nothing I do not react to."
— Grock ( Clown name of Adrien Wettach's, one of Europes most famous circus clowns), Life's a Lark
New Sexualities
In virtual environments like Second Life, people are engaging in sexual practices outside of male/female conceptions, choosing to have sex in the character of a dragon, a cat or a bunny. This experience also parallels transgender subjectivities such as people who identify as Bunnies [3] or Monsters [4].
Given that these categories of people feel a strong attachment to these persona, how far can they be enabled to live within them? Current technology for gender confirmation surgery is still very limited. How can new biotechnologies enable the real life construction of new identities beyond male and female? Current medical procedures for gender confirmation surgery involve outdated psychological examinations and requirements based on moralistic decisions about the sanctity of the body and the pathology of "Gender Identity Disorder". What possibility lies beyond these restrictions when combined with radically new powerful technologies for body modification? How might virtual environments like Second Life be used to facilitate transformation and experimentation with these new identities? And what does this tell us about identity as a social process, as a series of interactions and feedback loops?
Gener Confirmation Procedures in particular show the failure of the promise of biotech. While on one hand, we are presented with the promise of total control over the body, in reality, for example, F to M surgical procedures are still totally inadequate and very preliminary.
Experiments
Performative pieces and experiments as part of this project include:
- Stage 1: Durational experiments of living in virtual space, this reseach has begun, for more info see Becoming Dragon: Stage 1
- Stage 2: Experiments with biotechnologies thay may enable large scale skin color changes, fur growth or additional limbs, such as wings or tails. On what scale can these experiments occur? See Stelarc's with with the Tissue and Culture project [7] and Orlan's plastic surgery performances [8] for more info.
- Stage 3: Exploring body hacking techniques to see how they may be used to facilitate these new bodily practices of gender and sexuality cheaply, in a way accessible to more people.
Body Hacking
Body Hacking has been described as "functional body modification" by Quinn Norton. For more information, see:
http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/bodyhacking.html
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/events/1629.en.html
http://media.hojann.net/23C3/23C3-1629-en-body_hacking.m4v
http://www.archive.org/details/Etech08PresentationISingTheBodyElectric
Background and Historical Resonances
For more background on this project, see http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2007/11/21/for-total-gender-liberation/
Stories were told that members of AIM escaped from custody because they were Skinwalkers, capable of changing shape.
The tradition of performance and the very concept of liminal space is related to ideas from Shamanic practice that Shamans become animals or spirits during ritual. The history of Transgender people as described in Transgender Warrior by Leslie Feinberg describes the close relationship of these Shamans, two-spirit people, to early transgender practices.
The dragon itself has been seen as a figure beyond human, of magic, an expression of the excess in human experience beyond rationality.
Footnotes
1. Celia Pearce and Artemesia, "Communities of Play: The social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds", SecondPerson: Role Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, http://egg.lcc.gatech.edu/publications/PearceSP_Final.pdf
2. Genderqueer: Stories from Beyond the Binary, Riki Wilchins
3. See Tabea Huth's interview with Elektra Thunderbunny
4. See the Monster Transgender zine
5. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/
6. http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/28029
7. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/extra_ear/index.htm
The free skool kids are silly: http://www.sharingissexy.org/wiki/Image:Micha_mcmichanous.jpg
