Heidi Gilpin versión en español

"Cybertrauma and the Disorders of Testimony"

What do inscriptions in the symbolic --of bodily and psychic identity and interaction-- have to do with performances of dismemberment and death? In many forms of cyberexperience, we are confronted with representations of life through the embodiment of death, or at least examples of the elimination of the movement of life, whether by the amputation of limbs, or by the depiction of interaction between ostensibly present but manifestly absent bodies. Representations of dismemberment, disfigurement, absence, and trauma pervade contemporary cultural production, where the complex relation between memory and history is being excavated and explored with increasing intensity. These issues have yet to be explored critically in the digital genres in which movement is an inherent component. In "Cybertrauma," I propose a model for the development of a discourse informed by critical and cultural theory, architectural theory, and psychoanalysis to address a number of psychological and spatial disorders encountered in cyberspace.

The relation of trauma and event to the constructions, disfigurements, and elisions of identity in cyberspace expose digital media as a site both for the performance and for the working-through of collective and individual symptoms of trauma. I will observe the relations between the work of recent media artists and the rhizomatic systems of composition and interpretation engendered by the psychographics of cyberspace that enact a theater of testimony. If the performative transmits motion and its simultaneous vanishing, how can new media projects convey such performativity in the interactivity they impose, and the witness-consciousness they desire and fear? The digital reincorporates the desiring body, and the traumatized body, in ways that expose the inherently kinesthetic nature of perception. In its ability to synchronize material and immaterial realms, being digital reveals a fear of the very agency it proposes: Does being digital risk eliminating the possibility of bearing witness?

Questions to be addressed include: How do the senses operate in the act of witnessing? How has the digital codification of the senses affected witnessing? What is the relation between the consciousness of corporeality in motion and the memory of that motion as witnessed in digital space? Issues to be explored include kinesthesia as cultural artifact, forms of bodily representation (physical and psychic) in various interface systems, performative digitalia, and the nature of post traumatic stress disorder and disorientation phenomena in the context of digital experience. Material will be drawn from the medical and theoretical work of A.R. Luria, Oliver Sacks, Cathy Caruth, Gilles Deleuze, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman; and from the media and performance work of Bob Flanagan, Christian Moller, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Perry Hoberman, William Forsythe, Jim Campbell, Toni Dove, and Pina Bausch.

Biography:

Heidi Gilpin is Assistant Professor in the multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in Dance History and Theory of the Department of Dance at the University of California at Riverside. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, lectures and publishes internationally on critical theory, new media technologies, performance, and architecture, and was a founding editor of Copyright and Parallax, both journals of cultural criticism and performance. Since 1989 she has worked as the Dramaturg of William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet, most recently on Eidos: Telos (1995), an evening-length production involving interactive technologies. Gilpin is presently engaged in performance, electronic media, and internet projects, and is completing a book entitled Traumatic Events: Toward a Poetics of Movement Performance. She is also editing an anthology about the aesthetics and contexts of new media technologies. Search the Web