presented as "The Embodied Eye--The Body w/o Organs" atThe Seventh
Bienniel Symposium on Art and Technologyat Connecticut College, February 1999;

and as "Building Myself a Body w/o Organs" at Computers in Art and Design
Education 1999 University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK; April 1999;

and at INVENCAO-THINKING THE NEXT MILLENIUM, Itau Cultural, ISEA,
and CAiiA-STAR, Sao Paulo, Brazil, August 1999.




Building Myself a "Body without Organs"
(a project in process)







Gregory Little, Assistant Professor of Art
Kent State University Stark Campus
Canton Ohio, USA




Abstract: My current VR project combines the philosophical trope of re-constructing the body according to tensions between flesh and language, embodied emotion and autocratic anatomy; with 3D computer models gleaned from real human sources. By registering and stitching together information extracted from The Visible Human Project I am building accurate 3D computer models of internal organs. These models are being placed inside a 3D model of my own body, created by a head to toe laser scan. The eye of the viewer is unanchored from its external view of "out there" and turned outside in, free to roam the virtual body, to look at the a reconstructed "in here" that is simultaneously part of us and inaccessible to us. The organs, relieved of any organic imperatives, become autonomous digital agents, animated morphing electronic nomads, and coded cavities for narrative. Each organ is responsive to the independent movements of another and ultimately responsive to the participant in an immersive virtual environment of computer simulation.

Keywords: Artaud, "The Body without Organs", "The Visible Human Project", The CAESAR Project



1. Introduction

Our physicality, despite its neat packaging within the discourses of biology, beauty, ergonomics, spirituality, and fashion, remains alien to most of us, an "other" or possession; the consequence of tedious Cartesian mind-body bifurcation. It is important to understand how the above mentioned discourses function in concert to support and maintain relative levels of human alienation, thereby creating a sense of division and longing for completion at our very core. This alienation and basic feeling of division works at the service of larger structures of social order like religion and capitalism in the creation of lack-based desire, (Deleuze and Guattari) commodity fetish, and myths of salvation. In the last section of my recent essay "A Manifesto for Avatars", I challenged myself and others to work toward stepping outside these discourses, "to cast off the dumbing down manacles of wholistics, universals, boundaries, acceptablilities, salvations, moral imperatives, family values, personal fantasies, dualisms, and the 'god trick' (Haraway) to, in the words of Anton Artaud, build ourselves a "body without organs". By creating a computer simulation that is literally embodied, and by simultaneously disrupting the medical model of anatomical hierarchies of mind and body, I hope to create an interactive work of art that encourages and foregrounds a sense of being 'bodily' (Heidegger) and of distributed consciousness. For Invencao I propose to discuss my progress toward this end.


2. Destination

I am constructing an immersive, interactive multimedia simulation that places participants in a landscape within the human body, reminiscent in a very basic sense of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, directed by Richard Fleischer. The organs of the body, free from any functional, biological imperatives and autocratic hierarchies, act as autonomous actors with choreographed behaviors and multimedia events coded into their interstitial linings. I will be weaving three datasets, two of anatomical models derived from real human sources representing the organs (Visible Human Project) and external skin (CyberWare Whole Body Scan) of real, lived bodies (Merleau-Ponty), and one of unbound subjective elements of my own consciousness, via memory, visualization, narration, and sensation. In addition to supporting a sense of embodied being and distributed consciousness, I ultimately hope to distribute the unbound, deconstructed properties of my own consciousness, in the forms of multimedia samples and texts, across my virtual body, creating an immersive artistic context for the interactive reterritorialization of these separate sensations into new emergent conscious experience for participants in the piece.

2.1 LINES OF SYNERGY
I descended from street level toward the F-Train stop at the corner of Houston and Broadway. It was the early morning and I was returning home from an all night session at my second job, editing video for Temmer Video/Teletechniques on West 19th Street. Sleep deprived and near dream consciousness, my psyche was very relaxed and permeable. New York City and I had once again slipped into each other, our convergence began to take on that familiar quality of Cinematic Spectacle. As I approached the Brooklyn bound platform, the song of a cellist playing a passionate and tender Brahms waltz echoed through the matrix of tunnels, weaving with the stale air charged with thousands of volts of electricity. As the cellist's mournful sound filled the acrid air, I sat down near the musician and prepared for the long wait for my train by renewing my reading of Foucault's Madness and Civilization:

Something new appears on the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; the ship of fools, a strange 'drunken boat' that glides along the calm waters of the Rhineland. . . .for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo (the Mad) from town to town" (p. 43)

As the Brahms waltz delicately approached another crescendo, a blast of stale air pierced my consciousness, followed by the deafening roar, clang, and screech of metal on metal as an incoming train arrived across the platform. A chaos of intersecting vectors followed, as people, conversations, and pop music rushed in different directions. Then bells, doors close, and the train departs slowly. A moment of silence follows, then the Brahms resurfaced, like a single line; taut, elevated, self-sustaining, then tumbling gently into melody. I looked back at my book:

"One might suppose it was a general means of extradition by which municipalities sent wandering madmen out of their own jurisdiction. . . . (but) certain madmen were admitted to hospitals and cared for. One might then speculate that among them only the foreigners were driven away, each city agreeing to care for those madmen among its own citizens." (p. 44-45)

Once again my concentration was penetrated, this time not by the mechanistic, but by the all too human. A voice came loud, strained, and angry from across the platform. A man signifying all the familiar codes of homelessness shouted and gestured spasmodically at an adversary who was invisible to me. His eyes grew wide as he stomped his bare feet, shook his fists, and shouted in a language unknown to me. All this seemed in counterpoint to the Brahms waltz, like a bizarre musical. He had stepped off the last train to stop, and he would probably get back on the next to arrive. One might suppose that he was part of the culture that road the trains all day and night.

"Navigation" continued Foucault, "delivers man to the uncertainty of fate. . . every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fool's boat; it is from the other world that he comes. His passage must enclose him, if he cannot have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely." (p. 48)


2.2 MAKING OURSELVES A "BODY WITHOUT ORGANS"
The surrealist poet Antonin Artaud stood before his dressing mirror. As he instructed his left hand to brush his hair, to his surprise the hand remained still as his tongue caressed his lips. An attempt to open his mouth caused his right ankle to turn. Artaud had become unmapped. The hierarchy of bodily organization, the "organic organization of the organs" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and the territorialization of his cerebral cortex had become scrambled. He found "himself with no shape or form whatsoever" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Artaud described this experience as "the body without organs (BwO)". He called for detachment of the things of consciousness away from captivity in the brain, and a reclassification according to an emotional or affective order (Thacker, 1998). Artaud, as an addict and schizophrenic receiving intensive electroshock treatment and drug therapy, sought a definition of the body that could resist the methods used to control and alter his consciousness--he desired to become unconsumable. The BwO mirrors post-biological structures that undermine anatomical classification, capitalist consumption, and tedious mind/body/commodity separations in support of a more distributed, nomadic, and emergent model of embodied consciousness.


3. Initial Preconditions

3.1 DATASETS
There are three datasets that comprise the raw materials of this project. The first dataset is a 3D scan of my own external body, forming an architectural anatomical container or context to contain the participants, narratives, and agents. The second body of data is The Visible Human Project, sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Health, from which internal viscera is being constructed to form 3D models of the organs. The third dataset is a database of unbound qualia, or sensorial experiences in the forms of multimedia events that are reconstructions of memories, dreams, visions, fears, and hallucinations recorded through web interaction, body-oriented psychotherapy, dream journals, and Raja Yogic meditation practice. A more in depth description of these datasets follows.

3.11 The CyberWare WB4 Full Body Laser Scan
Through my knowledge of The CAESAR Project, sponsored by The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) I learned of the existence of the CyberWare WB4 Full Body Laser Scanner and set out to obtain an affordable scan of myself. After much inquiry I was given the name of Dr. Hongwei Hsiao, Chief of the Protective Technology Branch, Division of Safety Research, at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, West Virginia. Dr. Hsiao generously made available to me two technicians and the WB4 Scanner (Figure 1) and I was able to obtain high resolution scans of my body gratis. Each scan took about 12 seconds and produced an accurate, detailed anthropomorphic digital skin complete with a color map (Figure 2). These scans allow me to escape the generic, stereotypically perfect white bodies offered by commercial 3D programs like Poser (MetaCreations), and allows me to achieve a self-referential subjectivity necessary to this piece.


3.12 The Visible Human Project
The Visible Human Project is a 14 million dollar U.S. government project that sponsored the creation of a universal, standardized set of anatomical images of a "normal" (NIH report) male and female body. The project is funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health, and is a collaboration between the National Library of Medicine, a branch of the NIH, and the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado, the team that did the actual gathering of data. The Visible Man dataset was completed in 1994, and the Visible Woman in 1995. The datasets are available for a price from the NIH Website, and several CD-ROMs are available as well. The images and constructed models derived from The Visible Human Project form what is considered to be the most accurate anatomical studies to date. Not only is the data from actual human subjects, but it is the closest thing yet to fresh, living tissue and organs because the subjects died in states of relative health, and were immediately preserved by freezing. Digital 3D models reconstructed from this project are also considered to be so close to living bodies that as virtual bodies they offer ideal models for anatomical study and virtual surgery. The first step in producing the dataset was for The Center for Human Simulation to embed in gelatin and deep freeze the fresh corpse of, in the case of the Visible Man, executed murder John Paul Jerigan, and in the case of the Visible Female, an anonymous Maryland "housewife" (NIH Reports). Each frozen body was sawed into quarters and passed through a cryogenic macrotome-a very accurate saw. Then the bodies were "milled away" (Cartwright) in paper-thin increments. After each pass of the saw, a color photograph was made of the flat cross-section of what remained (see figure 3). Accurate 3D computer models of internal tissue and organs have since been produced by a number of researchers. Very high resolution polygonal models are being produced. (see figure 4). by isolating contours of particular organs using image processing algorithms, converting each 2D contour to a 3D spline, registering each spline in a modeling program, and wrapping a virtual "skin" around the framework.
3.13 Deterritorialized Subjective Qualia
Documented subjective memories, narratives, sensations, and visualizations that emerge through experiences of dream journals, body oriented gestalt therapy, and Raja Yoga Meditation are being interpreted as texts, images, animations, and audio files. These individual properties that construct my experience of a particular qualia , like sound, vision, motion, color, etc., will be separated out, unbound, or deterritorialized from one other and placed in parallel databases that are mapped to particular organs and locations within the virtual anatomical world. Qualia, a term common to discourses in Cognitive Psychology and Consciousness Studies, refers to the various properties of a given conscious experience, the way things seem to us at a particular moment. (Dennett) For example, as I sit at this computer, I have a subjective tactile awareness of the feel of the keys under my fingers, of the slight ache in my lower back. I am also aware of the sound of the ventilation system, humming quietly somewhere above and behind me. I am visually aware of the screen as I type, of the books, papers, keys, computer equipment, etc. that surround me and are the quale of my visual experience of my being at this moment. The nature of Descartes' doubt is revealing relative to the notion of qualia. He seemed to doubt everything that he could possible doubt, that "everything which is distinct from us is false" (Descartes). Although to Descartes all the sensations I described above are mere illusions, fabrications, or hallucinations, he could not doubt that I apprehended them, that I experienced properties like tactility or pain. He could doubt the existence of the objects that I apprehended (the keyboard, etc), but he could not doubt that I had subjectively apprehended properties, or qualia, related to these non-existent objects (Dennett). The separation of properties from things, signifier from signified, is definitive of the act of unbinding. Thus any given instance of being could be said to be defined on a subjective level by a particular database, cluster or constellation of qualia. Deterritorializing, or unbinding qualia then, is a process of separating properties of a particular instance of being from each other and their temporality, so the properties remain, but the instance is no longer. Then the properties can be organized in other ways. Auditory properties could be together in the same database, visual in another, textual, tactile, hallucinogenic each in their own. In this piece the interaction of a participant will cause the elements of these databases to combine randomly, potentially reterritorializing the separate properties into a particular instance or temporality, creating new, emergent experience for the participant.


4.0 Trajectories

"Making myself a Body without Organs" emerges from a swarm of intersecting trajectories, including the visual, the subjective, the philosophical, the biological, the technological, the immersive, and the interactive. A look at the specific axes of trajectory; that is, the conditions and problems of each trajectory, will begin to reveal the potential crossings, schizoid penetrations and emergent rhizomes possible in my interpretation of Artuad's desire to "make human anatomy dance at last". In the context of this report of a work in progress, I will now discuss the implications of the what I shall call the Biological Discourse Trajectory, and then suggest definitions of others that will certainly effect the choreography of the Dance of the Body without Organs.

4.1 BIOLOGICAL DISCOURSE TRAJECTORIES

Biology is not a canon for the understanding of life forms, not a textbook explanation of the organic, but a discourse. (Haraway) The discourse "biology" covertly supports hegemonic issues that shape categories of race, class and gender, like who survives, who has and who has not. Usually when one speaks of biology, one does not mean the blood and tissue, one refers the body politic through categories of gender, sexual preference, blood line, (dis)ability, and skin color. Biological hierarchies based in constructed biological "truths" of the body politic can be used very effectively to endorse institutionalized sexism, racism, geneism; and to support related concepts like the "natural" (that is, occurring in nature) foundations of our social and biological order like the nuclear family, hetrosexuality, male domination, and competition. (Haraway) Our canon of the "taboo" functions to distance us from certain border crossing and biological acts. There is something taboo, something abject (Kristeva) about penetrating the boundaries of skin, about our embodied biologies, our insides, and simultaneously something absolutely fascinating and mysterious. (Scarry). This project crosses that boundary and inhabits the visceral, attempting to reorganize the organic, redefine the biological, and remap consciousness as a part of our biology. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin." Many alternatives to the autocratic hierarchy of mind and body, and specialized categorized biological systems exist. Indeed, studies addressing the mapping of the Cerebral Cortex (Penfield) find a radically different construction of our biology-the thigh is connected to the shoulder, a huge hand to the forehead, an enormous tongue balances on the chin, and the huge head along with the hand, make up two-thirds of the body. (Figure 5). In addition, research in the newly formed field of neurogastroenterology shows that the gut, and the enteric nervous system contains every class of neurotransmitter that was thought to be only in the brain, and in greater quantity than the brain. What is being called "the second mind" (Gerson, McNally, Anton) participates in the dislocation of the concept of mind from its stead in the brain and distributes it across the body. Artaud called for detachment of the things of consciousness away from captivity in the brain, and a reclassification according to an emotional or affective order. (Thacker) Hands-on techniques of Body-oriented practices like Gestalt Therapy clarify the role of touch and body manipulation in the retrieval of experiences and sensations lost to conscious memory. These well documented accounts (Heller, Kepner, Perls) point to the notion that memory may not actually be stored exclusively in the brain, but may reside in the muscles and tissues (Langer). In this project biological structures are foregrounded that undermine mind/body dualism in support of a more distributed, embodied, and emergent model of consciousness.



For images, quicktimes, and vrml worlds documenting the project "Building myself a Body w/o Organs", see my website at: http://www.oberlin.edu/~glittle/avatar or email me at glittle@stark.kent.edu




6. References

Cartwright, Lisa, "A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project", The Visible Woman, Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, eds. P. Treichler, L. Cartwright, C. Penley, New York University Press, (New York, London, 1998), p. 26.

CyberWare WB4 Whole Body Scanner,http://www.cyberware.com/products/WholeBody.html

Deleuze, Giles., and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, pp. 28.

Dennett, Daniel C., "Quining Qualia", The Nature of Consciousness-Philosophical Debates, eds. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Guzeldere, Cambridge, London, The MIT Press, 1998, p. 619-639.

Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage Books, 1988, p. 43-48

Little, Gregory, "A Manifesto for Avatars", Intertexts, Special Issue: Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies, volume 3, number 2; Ed. Bruce Clarke; Lubbock, Texas Tech University Press; 1999.

Haraway, Donna, "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway", Technoculture, eds. C. Penley and A. Ross, for the Social Text Collective, Minneapolis, Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 5.

_______."The Past is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theories of Production and Reproduction in Primate Behaviour Studies", from Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, (New York and London, 1986), pp. 21-42.

Heidegger, Martin,"The Will to Power as Art", Nietzsche, vol. 1, Harper and Row (New York, 1975), p.209.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, Routledge (London, 1962), p. 137-142.

MetaCreations Poser, http://www.metacreations.com/products/

National Library of Medicine (U.S.) Board of Regents, Electronic Imaging, Report of the Board of Regents, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, NIH Publication, 1990, p. 90-2197.