사이버 공간의 몸 : 미술, 권력, 그리고 젠더

One of the main characteristics of the twentieth-century art is the development of new media. Since around 1960, the experiments in new technology have been frequented in the avant-garde art. The impact of rapidly growing mass media and the socio-cultural discourses of the postmodem conditions began to blur the traditional boundaries of arts, demanding the re-mapping of the artistic geography, Video art, computer graphics, web art, virtual reality are few names amongst many newly emerging fields of art. Generally called as cyberspace, the term coined by William Gibson in his science fiction entitled Neuromancer(1984), Internet emerged as an alternative space to the physical world. This paper explores the artistic use of the Internet and delves into the new definitions of body, power and gender in this new media. Canadian artist/engineer Steve Mann’s web project 〈ShootingBack〉, MIT media lab project 〈Tangible Bits〉, Australian media artist Simone Peterson’s 〈Bimbo Borg〉, Russian artist Kostya Mitenev’s 〈UNDINA〉, Victoria Vesna and the UCLA team project 〈Bodies INCorporated〉 will be examined in these contexts. In our society apparati of electronic surveillance and satellite systems pervade almost every sector of our public and private lives. Information conceming individuals is controlled mostly by institutions, serving bureaucratic or corporate interest. This paper examines the possibilities of counter-surveillance in socio-cultural practices through Steve Mann’s 〈ShootingBack〉. In this ‘meta-documentary,’ Mann dares to shoot back at the power of institutions and capital by recording the very devices of surveillance (e.g., surveillance cameras) with his tiny TV camera NetCam, which is hidden in his eyeglasses and connected to his wearable computer. This ‘shooting’ usually provokes quarrels with the clerks or the security guards. NetCam transmits the whole situation to share simultaneously others who have access to his website. Through this skirmish with authority, we can examine the structure of omnipresent, ‘capillary’ power and grope for the possibilities for counterveillance via World-Wide Web. If Mann’s project entertains the possibility of power-vision hegemonies from people’s point of view, 〈Tangible Bits〉 counters the deep-rooted ocularcentrism in the westem culture with the tactile communication. The body once ostracized from the visual world of screens and monitors made its come back with MIT’s experiments with 〈InTouch〉, a device that connects human motions and touch. Along with issues of physical body and the cyberspace, the body as an image in the cyberspace addresses new, definitions of gender and identity that radically depart from the traditional and biological notions of them, Peterson’s 〈Bimbo Borg〉 makes fun of the popular stereotypes of cyberbodies, the “Barbie” doll images of cyberwomen, whose bodies are almost always young, white and surgically enhanced near to the male fantasy of sexy cyborgs， Through these moving images and texts, we can follow the joumey of the Bimbo Borg from silent object of desire to a girl hero who has critical perspectives of her own. On the other hand, 〈UNDINA〉 and 〈Bodies INCorporated〉 explores the changing notions of gender and identity through the combinations of different body parts. In 〈Bodies INCorporated〉, for example, a user can choose his/her body regardless of his or her own biological sex or race, Among the 12 different materials that consist of body, a user choose and combines the given body parts. The avatar grows and even dies in this cyber world, The interactivity and the easy access made cyberspace attractive for many artists, Experiencing the life of avatar, a user undergoes ‘the other’’ s life and the rigid boundaries of gender roles and ethnicity, race are blurred, Depites the cyberspace’s liberating aspects, we should not neglect the fact that this ideal interface also exist under the control of pervasive capitalism.

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