week 3

Kustom Kar Kommandos
Kenneth Anger 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28AhRynu0A

Stelarc exoskeleton 1999
Leg movements controlled by arm gestures & controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzGraK_ldI&feature=related

Ballet mechanique 1924
Fernand Leger, dir, with cinematography by Man Ray
http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html

Modern Times, 1936
Charlie Chaplin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30

Micha Cardenas
Becoming Dragon
http://secondloop.wordpress.com/


What ever happened to the couch potato?

Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the image. The specter of the “couch potato,” propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture. Fused with the image in a mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat.

In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix. In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny eye and finger flickers. With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh. We wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the playgrounds of virtuality?

Those days, for better or worse, were soon over. The rallying cry became: Time to get in shape! Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.

It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.

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what the vehicle (metaphor) alludes to regarding to the history of art

The vehicle metaphor
allows us to look at almost anything in terms of how
technology - art - perception - body
come together in one 'cluster'

it allows us to look at how this 'cluster' has come to exist in different times and places

it allows us to look at changing forms of identity, movement, forces, objects, rhythms, desires, etc.

it allows us to look at how it effects & registers societal & personal change

through the vehicle, people, of various time periods, changed their view of the world and, thus, art itself. technology changed
their perception of the world (and being in the world) and as their perception changed so to did the technology (its being in the world).