POSTQUEER
ANTIBODIES:
STREET-GENDER-MEDIA
GUERRILLA
AMBIGUOUS
GENITALS PROJECTED IN THE STREETS
MICRODANCES
IN THE CITY: SURVEILLANCE
CAMERAS ON THE BODY TO PROJECT UNCERTAIN SEXUAL ORGANS AND AMORPHOUS BODY FRAGMENTS IN THE
PUBLIC SPACE OF THE CITY COUNTERACTING MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND BINARY GENDER
NORMATIVITY
ANTIBODIES of the city
_DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY POLITIC
0.01
a METAmedia METAformance by
REVERSO___JdV / JaiVal / Jaime del Val & OLINTO
ACTIONS IN THE STREETS OF
SUMMER 2008
BY
REVERSO
PRESENTING
FOR THE FIRST TIME THE
MUBP:
MOBILE UNIT FOR BODY PRODUCTION
SUBVERTING THE USE OF SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS PLACED ON THE BODY TO
PRODUCE AN AMORPHOUS INCONTROLLABLE BODY
ACTIONS
AGAINST THE NEW FORMS OF TOTALITARIANISM AND IMPLICIT CONTROL IN NEOLIBERAL
SOCIETIES THAT OPERATE BEHIND THE FAÇADE OF DEMOCRACIES AND NATION-STATES
ACTIONS AGAINST GENDER, SEXUALITY AND
INTIMATE-PUBLIC BINARIES: CLAIMING AN INTERSEXED, PANGENDER, METASEXUAL
SOCIETY AND PRODUCING A PUBLIC RELATIONAL PANSEXUAL BODY
REVERSO LAUNCHES A NEW CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE,
STREET INTERVENTION AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE THROUGH TECHNOLOGY, IN THE
CONVERGENCE OF MEDIA ARTS, MUSIC, DANCE AND ARCHITECTURE: A TECHNOLOGICAL,
ARTISTIC AND POLITICAL EXPERIMENT.
_________________________________________
FIRST ACTION:
DONE in epicentre of town; Gran Via Street,
80
min.
NEXT ACTIONS JULY 2008: see www.reverso.org - some will be done without prior
announcement.
_________________________________________
© CRÉDITS of TEXTS & PHOTOS: REVERSO_Jaime del VaL/JaiVal/JdV
PHOTOS,
VIDEOS & TEXTS IN: www.reverso.org/Anticuerpos-DISOLUCION.htm
___________________________________
THIS SUMMER AN ANTIBODY WALKS AROUND THE STREETS OF
MAYBE YOU WILL MEET HIR....
___________________________________
THE
CITY OF
-YEAR
ONE OF THE METABODY ERA-
Anatomy is destiny
S. Freud / Napoleon
Anatomy is a tecno-political
fiction: UNDOING anatomy is undoing the political
destiny of the body.
JdV_REVERSO
ANTIBODIES_DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY
POLITIC is a Metamedia Metaformance, a
political, artistic and technological intervention/performance/action in the
public space of the city by the group REVERSO – www.reverso.org.
JdV_REVERSO use surveillance
cameras on the body to decompose its anatomy and gender, and dishabilitate mechanisms of social control, in a unique
convergence of dance, performance, media arts, electroacoustics, architecture and space
interventions. A post-intimate, post-post-porn, post-posthuman, post-postcolonial, postqueer,
performance/action/intervention.
A naked body walks
by the streets of the city with 4 to 8 micro-surveillance cameras placed on the
skin, projecting fragments of the body through a projector placed in the chest.
Images become unintelligible and amorphous through proximity and angle of the
cameras. At the same time exposed and illegible, the hiper-vigilated
body becomes uncontrollable: amorphous, post-anatomic, pangender,
defying binaries and categories of sexuality and intimacy. It moves slowly in a
series of minimalist microdances, radical coreographies of a fragmented and multiple body-camera that defies all categorisation, as it appeals to
the desiring look in all its diffuse and fragmentary potential. Its voice is
processed life in a minicomputer, becoming a chorus of dissolving voices.
Through relating to by-passers new forms of relation occur, new forms of public
intimacy mediated by the surveillance camera, misused as instrument of
proximity. The frontiers of anatomy, identity and form dissolve and the
desiring look is dispersed in amorphous fragments in constant morphogenesis.
The body projects itself as an intensive architecture of desire that transforms
the relational body of the city.
An
illegible, irreducible, poetic and purposeless action, with radical political
after-effects and resonances: so does the group REVERSO denounce that we are
all vigilated and subdued to multiple explicit and
implicit norms, non-verbal and intensive architectures for the bodies, that we tacitly accept. Subverting
the same technologies that constitute the norms, the vigilated
body rebels against mechanisms of control and against the normative and
disciplinary scaffolding of market driven management of bodies. A metapolitical experiment in wearable technology, an
exercise in the undoing of surveillance and in deconstructing implicit power
regimes.
It is the MUBP: MOBILE UNIT FOR BODY PRODUCTION, also
called MUAP, MUGP or MUSP (MOBILE UNIT FOR ANTI-ANATOMY / GENDER / SEX
PRODUCTION), an inverse
surveillance system, a war-machine against the
disciplinary social organism understood as apparatus of power and violence, the
gender, sexuality and public-private binaries and the mechanisms of affective
production of bodies in latecapitalism. An experiment of
the body, of the displaced subject, of the dissolution of identity.
An uncommon cyborg
that projects amorphous, post-intimate, post-public genitals, that
projects itself in extrusions of diffuse identity and fragmented subjectivity,
that is displaced towards the amorphous image that is no longer image, but pure
intensity, body, antibody inoculated in the virus of serial affective
production of bodies, that floods over the normative territories of the social
organism. Its anatomy could fit the parameters of clinical and legal
assignation of sex and gender but it rebels against this apparatus and its
mechanisms of representation in order to become amorphous, intersexual,
pangender, post-posthuman. In the disciplinary network of the city the
projected intensities of this body curve the cartesian and binary frames towards new dimensions of
uncertain multiplicity.
__________________________________
¿Freaky exhibitionists? They
call it Metabody, a way of reapropriating
body and space in the neoliberal city, a form of
subversion of implicit norms and power mechanisms. They denounce the new forms
of implicit totalitarianism in latecapitalism, that
reproduce us as standard affective bodies in the chains of production and
consumption, which at the same time conceal the forms of violence on which the
economic system is based behind the hiperreal total
screen of media that have become both embodied vision and immersive virtual
reality, that has supplanted public and private space. Thus through leisure,
communication and information industries new discreet, reduced and standards
forms of life are being globally distributed, through the production of affect
and desire, and behind the farse of “progress” and
technological “liberation” and “democratisation”.
They deny
appertaining to the gender binary, which they reject as the primary political
fiction of body and affect formation, and propose a technological body that is
post-anatomic, amorphous, metasexual and pangender, that defies the disciplinary social organism, or
body politic, the fiction of democracy and the nation-state, which has become
façade for hidden market operations and corporate interests.
Instead they propose
a relational, intersexed, common and public social
body. They claim that we are all intersexuals
(hermaphrodites) sine we all undergo the processes of clinical and discursive
assignment of sex and gender according to arbitrary medical criteria that
regard reproductive sexuality and heterosexual normativity.
Instead they propose a diffuse body whose anatomy, in permanent morphogenesis,
appeals the desiring look in its open potential beyond the gender binary, as it
is dispersed in amorphous fragments of relational intensities, and at the same
time defies the mechanisms of affective production of bodies, objectification,
surveillance, and assimilation into market driven structures. Microsexual public acts, microgenders,
sexual anti-organs and proto-masturbations for a body-architecture that
produces a new kind of affective intensity in the city. The amorphous, pangender, metasexual
body becomes a weapon to undo mechanisms of control and normative territories.
To produce an intersexual
public body: intimacy is a biopolitical technology that closets the body in the realms
of the unspeakable while it is managed by corporations and the State: we have
to bring the processes of body production out of the neoliberal
and normative closet, liberate its code. The Metabody
would be an intermediate, intersticial body, of
projected, affective, non verbal intensities, a common body with no place for
the intimate private-divide.
The images of the hipervigilated body, that has become amorphous and uncontrollable, are
projected on the immaculate and fake surfaces of the system, on the
impenetrable total screen, opening black holes of uncertainty. The actions are
not explicitly sexual or pornographic, yet they linger on the edge of explicit
sexuality and pornography, thus challenging their conditions of possibility,
their domain of operation. This way multiple questions are raised concerning
the limits of intimacy, gender, identity, sex, sexuality, sexual work and
pornography, of the legal and viable, of the social organism as a whole, of the
human versus the inhuman, the animal, the machine, of the lives that are worth
respecting and living. An excercise
in radical ecology for relational bodies-territories beyond the binary
frameworks of speculation, virtualisation, subjectivation
and norm.
They are REVERSO - www.reverso.org,
a pioneering initiative in the conjuntion of
body-territory, arts, technology, critical theory and political action.
POST-ANATOMICAL BODIES
Anatomy and matter are to be understood as a tecno-political
fictions, products of representation technologies. These can be challenged through radical
interventions in the technology par excellance of production of anatomies, matter and objetivity: THE CAMERA. Through subversion of the technology
of the camera it is possible to produce a post-anatomical body that questions
the foundations of social organisation. In the place of the social disciplinary
organism, a social relational body would emerge, diffuse, intensive, amorphous,
that would attempt to make inviable the very
technologies and conditions of possibility of power, subjection and
objectification.
Amidst technocultures that reproduce us as standard bodies, of
normative spaces and territories colonised by speculation, the reverse spaces
of the city and the subliminal body of the performer come together as a new
intensity that generates an uncertain body-space, in the frontier of the speakable, metabodies that defy
standardisation and assimilation in the society of control.
Foucaultian Don Quixote, Deleuzian Zarathustra, Proustian Ulysses: a form
of protest that brings together transdisciplinary
artistic practices, new technologies, critical thinking and political action. A mobile micro-opera/ballet/theatre guerrilla. A micro-theatre, micro-Recherche of the body. A visual,
sound, architectural and coreographic intervention in
the body of the city and the postglobal social
organism. A form of technoterrorism
against discursive and formal boundaries of social norms and hidden power
networks. A war machine against implicit forms of
domination in latecapitalist times. A guerrilla for the undoing of gender, sexuality and
intimate-public binaries. A sabotàge of implicit processes of
affective production of bodies in neoliberal society.
And at the same time an irreducible poetic metasignificant
gesture, a radical coreography that defies reduction
to interpretation, a metaformance open to
contingency, an apparatus for affective production of anti-bodies.
DISSOLUTION OF THE
BODY POLITIC proposes
interventions in entire cities throughout periods of weeks or months, going
through different aspects of the anatomy of the
city and the body politic. From museums and theatres to surveillance
cameras and advertisements, in courts and prisons, highways and other
infrastructures, military camps, embassies and consulates, political parties,
parliaments, ministries and other organisms of administration, ONG’s commercial centres, global corporations, tourist
areas, cathedrals and churches, rivers, industrial areas, business areas,
centre of town, areas subject to speculation and gentrification, airports,
ports, stations, urbanisations, nuclear stations, mines, phone antennas, public
transport, residential areas, marginal sex areas and gay ghettos... The amorphous public genitals projected
onto the façades of the system inoculate
an antibody for the latecapitalist virus of
affective body production: exorcisms of the zombie society that operates behind
the façade of “sovereign subjects” and “civil rights”.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ANTIBODIES is an hommàge
to the first performance that we know of, done by Diogenes of Sinope in the 3rd Century b.c.
(2.300 years b.m.e. -before Metabody
Era) in which he walked around the city naked inside a winecube,
with a lantern looking for someone worth attention, and to his public
masturbations. It is also an hommàge to the Public Genitals
Project and the Near Legibility Project by Sandy Stone. To the Videoman of Fernando Llanos, to the Suspensions in public
spaces and exoskeletons of Stelarc, to Steve Mann’s
wearable projects, to Hannah Villiger’s photography
and Pedro Garhel’s performances, to the Graffiti
Research Lab, to street artists, street dancers and activists, to Pat Califia and her defense of public
sex, To Antonin Artaud, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, the cyberfeminists,
queer and postqueer, porn and post-porn activists,
sex-workers, and those who have prepared the arena for the philosophical and
political framework of the project. To Guillermo Gomez Peña, for being a “postcolonial intellectual”...
ANTIBODIES is an
independent initiative by REVERSO, a pioneering initiative in the conjuntion
of body-territory, arts, technology, critical theory and political action, which
started in 2000 as the first journal of queer theory in Spanish. Since 2001
REVERSO has developed and presented extensively in
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INSTRUCTIONS: use
surveillance cameras and wearable equipment on the naked body to project
amorphous body fragments and processed voice in the streets, undo the anatomy
of the social body and establish new kinds of amorphous, relational, public, common
and intersticial, pangender,
metasexual bodies while resisting gender binarisms and current mechanisms of control,
standardisation, assimilation and affective production of bodies in latecapitalism.