The Hyper-Mediated Bodies in the Age of New Media
This essay attempts to trace the various implications of bodies which are made from the integration of human body with technologies in the contexts of art. I investigated the body transformations and mediation-effects from combinations of human body with chips, prostheses, surgical operations in artistic performances. The hyper-mediated bodies in this essay means the bodies that encounter with technology directly, are mediated, added, and metamorphosed or modified by technology, and are fascinated with technology, confirmed by medial diversity and mediation. Technology may be machines or not. Hypermediated body tends to stress not finished result but the process itself as the heterogeneous. It also has the postmodern deconstructive characteristics of body of deformation, fragmentation, inter-penetration, hybridization, and diversity. The notion of‘ hyper-mediation’ comes from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation, Understanding New Media(2000). I studied the real practices of integration of body and technology in art, not only ways of artistic expression but also the various meanings of the very point of integration. My standpoint on‘ Posthuman’ concept which we will meet inevitably in the near future, is neither negative or positive. I am just concerned with the reconstruction of bodies in art, and with the ways how artists accept and express these situations. There are delicate dialectical meanings in the point or edge where body and technology meet and contact. They arouse from the process of acknowledging of inter-construction, integration of human and technology. They also run parallel with theoretical methodologies from gender study, philosophy, literary criticism and visual culture, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, cyber-theory, biomedicine, and phenomenology etc. Through these means, they attend to the dialectics between subject and object, flesh(meat) and machine, metaphor and materiality, figuration and literality, inside and outside, internalization and externalization, body and technology, human and posthuman. These opposite elements are linked in the relations of mediation and transformation each other. The Hyper ― Mediated Bodies in the Age of New Media Jeon, Hyesook(Ewha Womans University, Assistant Professor) In this essay, I treated Australian artist Stelarc and French artist Orlan's hyper-mediated body performances. Their bodies are the modified and added constructions, and they have accepted the very liminality itself and the way of‘ becoming’ through cyborg-like encounter(human/machine) and surgical operations. They opened a new understanding of hyper-mediated bodies in the age of new media.