Chapter 13 Addenda, Phenomenology, Embodiment: Cyborgs and Disability Performance

Chapter 13 Addenda, Phenomenology, Embodiment: Cyborgs and Disability Performance
The cyborg can be defined as a person with addenda and addenda of disabled people can have a dual function in contemporary visual work. They not only act as semiotic markers of difference, but also as seductive performance invitations into a different form of embodiment. To address the nature of this sensual engagement with otherness it is needed to analyze the visual tactility or tactile visuality discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
To Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist, visual representation is in a productive tension with a form of tactility, the physical extension of vision. The deep connection between tactility and visibility lies in the material sharing of the universes charted by the two senses. For example, in the computer games, which became ever more adept at creating the gravitational experience of driving on a race circuit, the tactility of viewing is demonstrated in a way such that the location of the eyes in relation to space, time and weight are manipulated.
Aimee Mullins visual persona is example of this fascination with non-traditional embodiment. She is a fashion model, athlete and activist who walk with leg prostheses. Through the movies and commercials the eye is seduced into spatiality and viscerality through the camera. For example in the Catwalk TV advertisement (2000) placing of closer view of Mullin's knees amongst hand-held, fast moving, 'atmosphere' shots emphasizes the relative normality of the situation and Aimee's unusual legs. As the shot travels up and down on her, the people with flesh legs feel kinaesthetically familiar to her through her clasping and laughing gestures. In Catwalk the animal imagery stands in counter point to metal legs, and meanwhile the strange is placed into familiarity through the sensual appeal, aligning the spectator to the freedom and to an echo of the Aimee's cyborg body. The addenda of the visible, the tactile, puts under erasure of the addenda of the body and on a trajectory towards unified engagement with a lived experience of disabled people.
Other part of seduction and engagement to addenda was through a Body Spaces (2000): a disability culture tech-performance. Through this fair, the participants created environments that choreograph the spectator's physical experience, that send spectators on a trajectory towards difference, and that the distance their spatial/visual/tactile experience from the normative. In the workshop the implications of architecture and normalisation, and normative processes of disabled was discussed. The participants attempted to undermine the conventional stories of restriction and tragedy that are attached to other bodies. The strategies in spatial technologies of movement and media technologies used to foreground phenomenological experiences was also discussed.
The first strategy discussed was photography, the dominating approach to the world that disvows the viewing self and that abstracts experience. Through the displays which were displayed in such a manner that neutral vision position was not possible, the photos became evidence for the embodied vision onto the world.
Second strategy was pathways, in that installation, spectator's attention was drawn into the different technologies of moving in space. The lines were mapped on the ground and the attempts of visitors to match these line inserted themselves bodily onto into these traces were interesting sight.
The last strategy mentioned was video, which was able to be manipulated by interactive controls offered to the visitors. The video Geometries investigated the geometries of bodies, their boundaries, and the shapes and volumes afforded by permanent and temporary addenda.
Body Space (2000) provided its visitors with a full trace of living differently, especially the different body experience through machines. It was an investigation of identity politics between and across the image and the body.
To conclude, through opening of these registers of continuity, the works can also be seen to play on the boundaries of the flesh/artifice/cyborg, both in their audience address as artefacts echoing physical experience, and as depictions of human 'addendas' which become part of different forms of embodiment: the exciting bodies can emerge out of popular culture's desire for new forms of embodiment, and new opportunities can open up for disabled people.