Bouldin, Joanna
Wabbit Twouble: Bugs Bunny, Drag and the Phenomenology of
a Rabbit
"Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and
played a girl bunny?"
-Garth, "Wayne’s World", 1992
Cartoons have always constituted an important and pleasurable part of my life and the
lives of many. As both a child and as an adult I have faithfully dedicated hundreds of
hours to watching these colorful friends of all shapes, sizes and species get into and out
of trouble, all within convenient, seven-minute scenarios. And, like Garth, I have found
that cartoons have an unexpected power to move me. Despite its wide appeal, the
animated cartoon is a surprisingly under-examined medium. This paper represents an initial
effort to provide a critical and theoretically nuanced analysis of the animated cartoon
and the experience of the cartoon viewer. Specifically, I will be examining the
performance of gender and drag by that particularly quixotic or, in the words of Rita Mae
Brown, "polymorphously perverse," Bugs Bunny.
The first portion of this paper addresses the ways in which gender is performed, or
mis-performed in Bugs’ many and varied appearances in drag. Although couched within
the "safe" genre of the cartoon, these queer or queering outbursts demand to be
read as self-conscious manipulations of traditional gender constructions and normative
heterosexuality. Utilizing Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity and her
theorization of drag, I illustrate the ways in which Bug’s "high camp" drag
destabilizes traditional gender signs within the cartoon’s assumed heterosexual
economy of desire.
However, because I feel that this essentially semiotic reading does not fully account
for the power of Bugs’ drag, I also attempt to address the role of the bodies
involved in these performances – both the malleable, genderless (or gender-full) body
of the animated figures as well as the body of the cartoon viewer. The second portion of
this paper is an attempt at a phenomenological theorization of the embodied experience of
the cartoon viewer, relying on the work of film theorist, Vivian Sobchack. Utilizing
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied vision, Sobchack attempts to craft a theory of
film and film spectatorship that takes into account the "somatic
intelligibility" of the cinematic image and the fully embodied experience of the
cinematic viewer, or cinesthetic subject. I attempt a similar theorization of the cartoon
viewer, taking into account the specificities of this very flexible medium.
Ultimately, I assert that the viewer’s sensuous, embodied engagement with the
animated image facilitates a deeper, more moving experience of Bugs’ gender anarchy.
The drag that this animated creature can perform is unlike any drag one could see in the
movies or in real life. Bugs doesn’t just do drag, he becomes drag. Rather than
simply adding clothes and removing hair, when this hare does drag his furry flesh
rearranges itself to provide him with full, pouting lips, perky tits and a sumptuous ass.
As evidenced in Garth’s innocent confusion, the viewer’s body is enlisted in
Bugs’ sexy game. As Bugs’ new body becomes the object of our own erotic designs
it becomes clear that this rabbit’s drag is manipulating heterosexist economies of
desire on both sides of the screen.
Brown, Jason
"Space Paranoids"
The desire for tools to organize increasingly complex fields of data has
spawned machinic assemblages that cannibalize the notions of truth and rational
organization which initially generated them. However the desire perversely persists; no
longer seeking rational organization, information tools are now fetish machines. This
iatrogenic dis-ease can be most evocatively examined in a historiography of the modern UFO
mythos, and in this project Vannevar Bush is used as the trace which illuminates the
development of these fetish/mythologies.
In the immediate post-war years when the Genesis events of the modern UFO mythology
took place, Vannevar Bush first described the Memex--a hypothetical machine which would
use "associative indexing" to catalog data. His description is often credited as
the origin of hypertext and therefore the Internet. Like the Memex, UFO's are also
hypothetical machines which act as nodes of association, increasingly surrounded by halos
of polysemy and cross-linked hyper/textuality. Indeed the UFO mythos has overtaken the
progeny of the Memex; the Internet which Vannevar Bush and his Memex are credited with
paternity currently has far more citations of Bush as the leader of a super-secret
government UFO cover-up than citations for his open-secret role in the crafting the
National Security State. A mythology of absence and alienation seems to be hallucinating
history better than history can describe itself; more than a symptom, this is the
condition in which history and meaning must now be produced.
Browning,
Margot
"Our Bodies, Our Computers: Medium, Prosthesis, and
Synchrony"
Computers are a temporal prosthesis for us, extending our reach into
infrastructural and transcultural realms that would otherwise elude our grasp. On the one
hand, computing technologies depend on us as beings that generate a bodily sense of time
through the physiology of our internal clock and the genetics of our life span. On the
other hand, computers change the place and perception of our biologically-created temporal
world by giving us access to both a nano-world of meanings and actions and a synchronous,
global world of Internet community. Computers leave our imprint on ‘nature’ by
altering the material circumstances from which cultures derive their temporal frames of
reference. Our ‘unnatural acts’ with computers are artifacts of how we
culturally alter our naturally-given material conditions.
Whatever simulations and identities we encounter through computer use, our bodily
experiences are the medium for new communities of synchronous time, through local or
global networks. This paper focuses the locus of performance onto the
spectator/surfer’s body: our computers have no impact without our engagement. What
are the powers of ‘computer charisma’? Do they deceive our senses like magical
sleights of hand? Do they entrance us or hypnotize us with multimedia rhythms and
patterns? Are we enchanted by creating our own digital world on the screen? In the midst
of the hype of unprecedented technological innovations, let’s compare the sense of
synchronous times that we experience through Internet interactivity with senses of time
that other, more familiar cultural artifacts create. In Imagined Communities,
Anderson analyses how newspapers and novels develop our experience of communities by
generating common temporal rituals and senses of shared, empty, and continuous time. Are
we fascinated with the synchrony of Internet time because it seems to promise new
identities through new communities? At the same time, how can we incorporate this newly
virtual experience of time and community into our other more familiar cultural
constructions?
New aesthetic experiences need to be vetted for their powers to enlighten or deceive by
activating body technologies of experience, evaluation, and judgment. I draw on Eugene
Gendlin’s techniques of "focusing" (from Focusing) to draw out
intuitive pathways for knowing better how CMC influences us, what we like, what we
don’t like, when it’s truthful and when it’s illusory. It can only make us
better judges of the performances of our own prostheses.
Case, Sue Ellen
Trans Performances: Capital and the Body on the Electronic
Stage
This talk will explore the role notions of gender play in the current
transnational arena. In the dawning of electronic space, the "live" body is
undergoing a radical shift in meaning. How do we consider the body and its traditional
signs of gender and sexuality in the global arena, or in the new "nation" formed
by the internet? On the one hand, the body seems to lose its importance, relegated to the
cyber-category of "meat"; on the other, gender and sexuality are central
categories in the formation of new transnational spaces and in the interface with the
internet.
"Performance" has become a key term in understanding how these forces work in
our time. By looking at what has been traditionally considered as performance and by using
performance to understand how gender works, we may discover strategies for coping with
this major shift into the technological revolution.
Csikszentmihalyi,
Chris
Species Substitute: Math and Life in the 20th
Century
For mathematicians of the mid twentieth century, the question was not
whether math and life are related, but more particularly, "How is math life?"
From Erwin Schroedinger's 1944 "What is Life," to Norbert Wiener's feedback
loops, to the work of computer pioneers Alan Turing and John von Neuman, mathematicians'
faith in the primacy of their discipline is matched only by their apparent disregard for
the complexity of their subject. The proliferation of computing technologies after World
War II gave many researchers a testbed for simulating life, a technique which continues in
contemporary projects like Artificial Life and parts of Cognitive Science. An overview of
this type of research shows that much of its rhetorical power rests in simple visual
equivalence. Several film texts will help to illustrate the relationship which images
mediate between math and life.
"Species Substitute," a technological research project, marks a crucial
moment in this history. In the mid-1970's, a hydropower consortium planned to build a damn
in the American Southwest. The flooding caused by the American Hydropower Institute's
proposed damn would cause the extinction of a rare species of ant. To circumvent
opposition from environmentalists and the EPA, AHI created the Species Substitute Robot
and Controlled Environment. This complex mixture of computers, math, and politics was to
provide a "machine for living," a regulated, artificial capsule that would keep
the ant species alive indefinitely.
Donatelli,
Cindy J.
Baudrillard’s "Body Politic" Materializes:
The Election of Jesse "The Body" Ventura
The recent election of Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor of
Minnesota signals the enactment of Baudrillard’s prophecy of the arrival of a
political body which is at one and the same time intensely material and simulated.
"The Body" of Jesse Ventura may be read as ground-zero for this implosion of the
social, for insofar as it is a wrestler’s body (despite Ventura’s denials to the
contrary), the materiality, role, and function of the body are indistinguishable from each
other. Wrestlers, in some fundamental sense are their bodies. Yet while the
wrestling body can be used as a sign of dense materiality, as it exists in the world of
the WWF, it is at the same time a mediated body that finds its proper home on the
television screen, which renders it, with all the trappings of television spectacle, as
hyperreal.
This talk will also contextualize the arrival of "The Body" in terms of other
political "bodies" of the late twentieth century. It is clear now that Muhammad
Ali and Ronald Reagan were stops along the way to a politics which leaves behind
metaphorical "wrestling with issues" for the real thing. We are also currently
in the grips of a material/mediated spectacle in which male bodies--what I am talking
about is pretty much gender-specific--trace Baudrillardian information-arcs with their
penises across television screens, not unlike the cruise missiles which recently showered
Iraq.
Frizzell,
Dwight
"Theater and Electrocuting an Elephant" writing
through Antonin Artaud
Between the ass and the shirt--Artaud as a self-canceling figure and an
heterogeneous process where consciousness and culture are on trial.
Between the fishbone and the explosion--the process of writing through violently
transplanted analogies: Theater=Plague= Theater= Electrocuting an Elephant (staged at
Coney Island in 1903 and filmed by Edison).
Between an ejaculated death rattle and everyone’s seizure--a pre-historic theater
of sacrifice where mammoth and bison are ritualistically hunted, and language emerges as a
process revealing the murder behind each word.
Between a handful of pins and an Electric Eden--the stench of a badly burned corpse
where contact between Albert Kemmler’s body and the electrodes is imperfectly made.
Mentation Gap
Artaud’s writing, fragmentary in nature, flows through the mentation gap between
his thought becoming conscious and what is fixable on the page. His martyrdom is
articulated with bombastic letters, essays, poems, scenarios, a radio show, and manifestos
of life, theater, and cruelty. Heroically, Artaud takes a self-canceling course to
crucifixion. The demonic forces gathering at Artaud’s haunt sail freely across the
bloodstream that comprises theater, cursing through the ancient chambers of Trois Fereres,
pivoting on the sacrifice behind each word that floats up on some futurological shore of a
utopia that is not to be.
Gross, Betsie
"Re(Presenting) and Re(Appropriating) the Postmortem
Body of Frida Kahlo"
I believe that after my death I am going to be the biggest piece of caca in
this world.
Frida Kahlo
Fredric Jameson pessimistically theorizes the conjunction of art with the
postmodern in his essay, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society,"
in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left to
imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the
imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be
about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential
messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the
new, the imprisonment in the past.
My view of the postmodern is not as nihilistic as that proffered by Jameson.
Consequently, in my excursus on mimetic and performative appropriations of Frida
Kahlo’s postmortem body throughout the 1990s, the postmodern will be broached as a
complex palimpest redolent with the politics of citation.
Hemment, Drew & Bedworth, Jonathan
The Edison (D)effect and the Sonic Machinic
This presentation seeks to explore how recording technologies have
challenged understandings of what counts as 'music' and shaped the way in which sound is
experienced. In place of the triad of composer-score-performance the notion of the 'sonic
machinic' as an assemblage of technologies, bodies and sounds will be advanced. From this
perspective, the interventions of the avant-garde and the utopianism of the digerati will
be set against the shock induced into the perceptual apparatus by the difference engines
of the studio, sound system and dancefloor.
The development of the phonograph can be seen as a particular point of departure. It
was the 'rupture of recording' which allowed for the first time an audio image to be
preserved. But whereas Edison intended his invention to be used to preserve perfect
copies, the incidental noises and imperfections came to be exploited in the production of
novel effects. The subsequent century of sound has been marked by the foregrounding of
interference, citation and secondary processes, a plastic art working within and through
the grain of the machine.
Implicit within recording technology is the twin potential for distribution and
manipulation. As distributive technologies, the phonograph, gramophone, radio, sound
system and internet all imply a trajectory of increasing scope for participatory
involvement and intervention: from the scratch and the remix, to the netcast and the
real-time digital shaping of sound.
In this context a new understanding of the art-work as net-work and of art practice as
simulation emerges. In the place of the discrete 'work' the sonic text is dispersed across
an entropic domain. And the progression of masterpieces is displaced by 'involution', the
turning of a prism to reveal different facets or aspects of a field of possibilities.
Rather than exposing the logical structure of a sound world, the surface of a sonic
terrain is explored.
Raising interesting questions regarding the relationship between the physical and the
virtual, these new technologies offer the possibility for further disembodiment but also
an equal re-embodiment in opening up musical spaces which are directly participatory and
immersive - a corporeal acousmatic music. This reconnects us with other musical
sensibilities and functionalities of sound that had been forgotten or marginalised in the
west. This distributed medium suggests (but neither forces nor invents) a dissemination of
the site of creativity, as at once sound becomes an aspect of a participatory milieu and a
function of embodied culture. In the words of Brain Eno the collective ‘scenius’
replaces the individual genius.
Loza, Susana
"Sampling (hetero)sexuality: Diva-ness and discipline
in electronic dance musics"
Electronic dance musics, such as techno and house, are
absolutely and unabashedly technologized. Said musics plot the jagged noises and smooth
sounds that result from the (un)easy aural union of the electronic and the organic.
Therefore, these musics could be seen as a sonic interrogation of the West’s current
cyborgian condition. Techno and house showcase the dynamic potential of human/computer
interfaces via their sonic mixes but their audio experiments also reveal the retrogressive
uses that such technologies can engender. Specifically, I would like to focus on the
liberatory and disciplinary uses of the computer-programmed loop of the diva vocal in
these musics. The diva loop can be seen as a cyborgian construction which is built by
splicing and mechanically multiplying the exagerrated peak of one natural(ized) and
ultrafeminized orgasmic cry until it surpasses the border of believability.
But does this sexed/sexy/sexing sample
radiate with a new kind of (auto)erotic enjoyment found in the spaces between the human
and the artificial? Or does it merely repackage old obsessions in sleeker formats? Is it
the orgasmic soundtrack of sexual liberation for the Information Age? Why does the
computer-enhanced diva loop come to transparently symbolize the naughty nexus of sex,
freedom, and erotic agency for carbon-based life forms? And how exactly does something as
technologized and disembodied as a repeating diva sample become re-naturalized,
racialized, and sexually essentialized? Can listeners hear the technological interventions
that transform the diva’s voice into the pleasure-drenched ululation of the fembot -
the feminized machine that rearticulates and encapsulates the worst in sexual stereotypes?
Can dance fans accept that they must work ceaselessly at libidinous liberation instead of
fixating on the fantastic (im)possibilities of perpetual sexual gratification as testified
to by the diva loop that consists solely of delirious peaks and ecstatic highs? Will
performative pleasures lead us away from the tired and binarized fembot conceptions of
cybersexuality to Haraway’s complex cyborgian conceptions of organic/electronic
interfaces? Or are we docile accomplices in our own continued sonic subjugation?
Maus, Fred
"Net.subjectivity"
The paper evokes a number of topics in an attempt to articulate some
experiences of online text-based cyberspaces such as email, unix talk, and MOO.
The topics are: the problematic notion of cyberspace as a world, to be compared or
contrasted with the real world; senses in which experience of text-based spaces are, and
are not, visual; the physicality of hands typing, and the difficulty of a phenomenology of
their role; issues about time on the net including "presentness," temporal
dislocation, and the sense that the net takes no real time; language on the net, and the
way the net seems to transform banality into something seductive and mysterious; the sense
of personal relations on the net as optional and dispensable; the role of real and
imagined sounds in net.experience; comparisons of online interaction and musical
improvisation.
Having evoked these topics, and done so in a language that is more literary than
scientific, I try to evoke net.experience in a more thoroughly literary way, by embedding
these themes in fictional writing that does not explicitly refer to electronic
communication.
Mosher, Jerry
"Putting Data on a Diet: Compression Technology and
the Myth of the Weightless Body"
This paper explores how contemporary anxieties about the body, food, and
waste are reflected in the construction of computer interfaces and data compression
technologies. The marketing of data compression products like "Stuffit"
frequently invokes the metaphor of the body as it mimics the marketing of dieting aids.
Promoting the idea that one can gorge on information and still maintain a "lean
machine," data compression fosters the myth of the weightless body and foods without
calories: that one can overindulge without the burden of excess. The weightless body is of
course an illusory ideal; the populations of most technocracies are experiencing
increasing rates of obesity and eating disorders. The overhyped "escape" from
the body into cyberspace, however, is still governed by issues of size: freedom of
navigation is dependent on the efficient management of data and machine. Concerns about
the body, food, and waste accompany the human presence in cyberspace, as do the cultural
issues that follow: dieting, sizism, and the (in)ability to manage abundance.
Ritter, Jonathan
"S(t)imulating Community: Virtual Drum and Bugle
Corps and the Hyperreal"
Despite its relatively brief existence, the Internet has created
radically new modes of communication and self-expression among a growing segment of the
world population with access to its technology. Perhaps most significantly, the web has
provided a space for the extension and/or creation of communities—serious, playful,
and imagined—that re-envision the parameters of human interaction. When communities
of common interest relocate or form anew online, they exist in varying degrees of
separation from the corporeal world; on the far end of this spectrum lies the simulated
community, a web of interaction without referent in the "actual" world. This
paper will explore the relationship between the virtual and actual worlds maintained by
one such community, the followers of drum and bugle corps, and the loosening ties of
referentiality in that relationship as virtual simulation occurs.
The drum and bugle corps community in the United States and Europe first approached the
Internet primarily as a tool for communication and self-promotion. Drum corps newspapers
and organizations went online in the early 1990s, using webpages to promote events and the
activity as a whole with slick graphics, video clips, chatrooms, and scores from the
summer competition circuit. The most unique corps-related web phenomenon, however, is the
emerging realm of "fantasy drum corps," in which dozens of fictitious drum and
bugle corps compete in imaginary online competitions. Drawing on cannibalized scores from
the regular drum corps season, virtual corps directors construct their units literally
from the pieces of actual corps, selecting particular drum lines, horn lines, and visual
effects to determine scoring in the online competitions. Unlike similar fantasy sports
leagues, fantasy drum corps has spawned a creative world of fictitious competitors, each
with their own web page, show concept, uniform, musical repertoire, and organizational
history. The material on these sites is a mixture of appropriated images from actual
corps’ webpages, names and information lampooning known figures and actual corps, and
newly created concepts and repertoire. These sites recall Jean Baudrillard’s
assertion of the hyperreal; the circulation and recycling of (real) drum corps images
disintegrating into self-referential details and constant reproduction.
I will explore the multiple strategies virtual corps players utilize to both simulate
and stimulate the actual drum and bugle corps community, challenging corps traditions with
creative innovations while evoking nostalgia for the "real thing"—drum
corps and community—through appropriations of cherished symbols.
Sellin, Yara
"DJ Spooky and Riddim Warfare: Investigating
Techno"
Analysis of the purely aural component of Techno has been unfairly
neglected in favor of examination of the flashy social context which surrounds this music
– clubs, DJs, dancers on drugs. Techno music is a wildly popular and varied genre
among a fairly large and equally varied subculture. As such, it deserves close semiotic as
well as formal musicological analysis. Close examination of "Polyphony of One,"
by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) demonstrates the various ways in
which the technological means used to produce the genre end up creating music with
specific characteristics. Techno music is a fully integrated phenomenon of technological
culture, in that it is both inspired by technology and realized by technological means
(computers, samplers, software programs and synthesizers). Due to these alternative
methods of production, it is also a music possessing timbral, rhythmic, textural and
structural features which distinguish it from other western harmonic and melodic
vocabulary provide the listener with a distinctive musical experience. As the name
implies, Techno has a lineage mediated by technology. The permeation of science and
technology into everyday life, music, art and common culture has resulted in a
fetishization of technology. "Polyphony of One" serves as a microcosm in which
to observe the evolution from acoustic music towards an electronic, technologically
mediated music.
Taylor, Timothy
D.
"Postwar Music and the Technoscientific
Imaginary"
"Postwar Music and the Technoscientific Imaginary" examines
the history of the invention of magnetic tape by German scientists in Wold War II, which,
following the war, caused great changes in the way recordings were made, and spawned new
kinds of music, including musique concrète, a music of found sounds associated
mainly with Pierre Schaeffer (1990-1995) and Pierre Henry (1927- ) in France. These and
other early composers of electronic music evinced certain anxieties about the use of
technology in their works, which produced two main aesthetic concerns. One was the extent
to which the composer controlled the form of the work, since it was being made with
technology; and the second, related issue concerned signification, which frequently was
left by the wayside as composers concentrated on form. For the musique concrète
composers this problem was particularly acute, for they used found sounds in their music:
how could the composer strip the meanings associated with found sounds and replace them
with his own meanings? This paper examines Pierre Henry in particular, who, unlike
virtually all of his contemporaries, insisted that music was not an art but a form of
communication. This position helped relegate his work to the outskirts of the canon of
western musical masterworks, but has also generated a following among today’s popular
electronic musicians who are attracted to Henry’s work both because of its
non-formalistic orientation, and because the anxiety over technology in our own era has
resulted in, among other things, contemporary electronic musicians seeking forbears in
order to locate themselves in a history of electronic music.
