the Internet being fed by human input, it constructs the activity of the body.”
(I find this frightening. I wonder if he found it frightening.)
(Often in my nightmares I see you feeding data into a computer, though computers didn’t even exist in your lifetime, waiting for the printout of my body, the information that will help you make me. Then I see some of my flesh is human, some constructed. Like the robot, Cog, my eyes are grayscale cameras, a microphone’s mounted in my head. I’ve been designed for “rich, flexible, dynamic interaction.” As I watch I feel my mind dissolving.)
Sometimes he performed with a robotic third hand and arm, or atop a pneumatic six-legged walking machine.
In 2003 he built a prosthetic head. (I remember Roger Bacon built a talking head. Albertus Magnus built a brass man.)
Once he implanted a mechanical device inside his stomach, then videotaped its actions, noting how “the hollow body becomes a host.”
“The body reclines, pacified, to accept the implant… the machine mechanism dances within …”
(He sounds almost joyful, finds a kind of freedom in a future without body-feeling, but what’s thinking apart from the body? How would I feel and experience what I think?)
“The body is no longer an object of desire but an object for designing.”
“Machines will manipulate molecular structures, extending the body from within … They will inhabit and navigate cellular spaces.”
Such future bodies will be “more complex and interesting,” each no longer a “single entity” but “host to a multiplicity of agents.”
(When I watched Claire and Mary and Clerval, wasn’t it partly their quiet suffering that made them vivid, all the ways I couldn’t reach or help them, the ways they were separate and enclosed?)
“Can a body act with neither recall nor desire? Can it act without emotion?”
“The body’s complexity, softness and wetness are difficult to sustain … A hollow body would be a better host for essential technological components.”
We live in a “zone of erasure.”
The body will no longer be interested in “circling itself, orbiting itself, illuminating and inspecting itself.”
It will become a collection place for efficient operational modules.
Think of a body that quivers and oscillates not to sadness, joy, heartbeat, lungs, circulation, but to the ebb and flow of computer activity.
(I close my eyes: Clerval’s hand moves from left to right across the page then back again, line after line of words appearing. Is he writing a letter to his friend? He warms some noodles, looks at the smoke trees out his window. Does he get dizzy for a few seconds when he stands? Does his hand suddenly remember the weight of a book, a pebble, a brook’s cold rushing water he played in as a boy? How odd the way something in us remembers even as we don’t remember—remembers without words.)
Notes on Eva Hesse
From 1964 until her death in 1970, she made sculpture from industrial materials: fiberglass, latex, rubberized cheesecloth, plastic, steel.
She didn’t want her work to be beautiful. Of Right After she said, “Coming back to it, I felt it needed more, and that was a mistake, because it left the ugly zone and went into the beauty zone.”
She had just been operated on for a brain tumor.
(Can ugliness be a form of beauty? Her latex panels look beautiful to me—each worn, damaged membrane slowly leaving but still tethered to the world.)
She wanted her work to be “non-work,” to exist beyond her preconceptions.
Right After can be hung differently each time.
(When thinking, my mind goes this way and that, swerves, reconsiders, swerves again. But I pull back, as if I must create a single line of thought, stable, unwavering—that this is what’s expected.)
“I don’t ask that pieces be moved and changed, only that they could be moved and changed.”
(Did you think control might make you safe? In your laboratory you sought so much of it. But what if you’d been more curious than frightened, though in your own way you were bold, determined? What if the result, my body, hadn’t filled you with revulsion?)
A friend remembers: “She found some object on the street—a broken pipe or something—called it a ‘nothing’ and said she wanted to make ‘nothings.’”
(If you and I could have seen ourselves as nothings, as not locked within the quantified, the known, the labeled, what might we have been to one another? Myself that broken pipe even now, scrap paper, crushed metal, fraying cord.)
In many of her pieces the latex is badly degrading. It oxidizes, weeps, turns brittle.
Some say those pieces are “beautiful ruins.” Others that they need