4. Refuse Closure : Not a Conclusion 22

When dealing with machines forohsotoolongnow, it is easy to think the body in terms of apparatus and interface. In this respect interface, cyberspace and translator body are comparable but not equal because the translator, the machine, the interface, the
programming can also be said to be in the sphere of the body. Interface uses the body image to incorporate machine into itself but it is never totally subsumed, Technology, which facilitates the entire system, has breached the skin by notion, how will it get out? Cyberspace is an extension: the space through the machines, the lines of communication, the language. This is a great distance for the psychic body to travel. Funny how it does it so well.

At the Biennale of Ideas it was universally agreed that 'reality' is now a commodity, or as Stone put it "the standard for wide-bandwidth communications" . The effect of reducing bandwidth is "to engage more of the participant's interpretive faculties." 23 Collective entertainment becomes the primary site for the ritual of contemporary bonding, and the distinction between human and machine is getting fuzzier.

Public body confrontation remains concrete. Krystoff Wodiczko has manufactured some objects to help the cyborged translator body negotiate real space. A face mask which spews tokens of exchange in a projected voice that is disassociated from the user. This is experience as commodity, blank in its lack of gesture, where only the
eyes may disagree with the visual and audio re-presentation of reality. Intimate, magnified, but fake communication.

Mis-use of technology for the purposes of entertainment is a potent way to negotiate this time. To be one step ahead of technology is to prepared for it with the necessary skills. Computers are progressively promoted as a domestic source of controlled pleasure where experience is received and not negotiated. Similarly science is still
about getting an answer. Experimentation is art/entertainment.

In MOOs the body gets to express a fantasy with people that believe 'I' as much as 'I' does, who interact with the given 'I'. To get a reaction to the experimental 'I' is to unleash the translator body to the folds of play. The flesh body relinquishes its position as sole source of status, pleasure and power.

Stone speaks of the anthropologist Lestat, a cyborg /virus vampire that has been to university and has modified his dark gift to the contamination of knowledge which changes visual apparatus. Lestat sees humans as mortals "transfixed not only by the arrow of time but in addition by the sword of subject position " 24 which is to be locked into existing in one space/time. The multiple body, in-human, fragmented, rezoned, in ten dimensions, challenges the nature of fixed identity.

Cyberspace is as good a place to do this as any. To go there is to be 'other seen' not seen or unseen. As with any radical journey you must ask yourself, do you really want to be a cyborg? You're going to loose a lot of friends, suddenly you can't just go to any doctor. It's going to be difficult but exciting. 'I' would not advocate
calling the whole thing off and will not overly criticise for 'I' fear arriving back in the same place that 'I' am trying to evolve from. Like any risk, size up all the options: be critical in uncovering all the complexities/dilemmas of fluid subjectivity.

wow. I got to the pear. I'm ready to sleep now. It's daytime, it has been a long night.....

.....

..

*

22 Roseanne Alluquere Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, 1995, pp30. In its entirety: "Refuse closure; insist upon situation; and seek multiplicity".

23 Ibid, pp93

24 Ibid pp182