I Levitate: What's Next (review)

This further edition of the TOX series ("A contemporary presentation of art, science, technology and social sciences") follows a volume, reviewed here recently, that was devoted to the works of Eduardo Kac. Invited contributors to this bilingual publication include Rachel Armstrong, Martin Jay, Stelarc, Mario Romiro and Simon Biggs, as well as Eduardo Kac. The contributions take the form of short, illustrated essays held together by the theme of "gravity." More specifically, the essays tend to deal with what might be called the "cultural resistance to gravity," exemplified through activities such as human flight, levitation, kinetic art, time machine construction and bodily suspension.

Martin Jay's lively paper weaves together strands of ideas about photography, memory and time with some of our varying cultural and scientific perceptions of light, the measurement of its velocity and the way it connects us with distant time and deepest space. From within this discussion, he builds an argument against one of the primary beliefs of post-modern theory as propagated by writers such as Jean Baudrillard, namely the autonomous and self-referential nature of signs. For Jay, such simulacral binarism (the divorcing of signs from their referents) cannot account for our experience of a universe in which remote events in space and time are indivisible from their delayed consequences here on Earth. Speaking of astronomical imaging, Jay writes: "Like the memory traces in Freud's 'optical apparatus' version of the unconscious, such images are not made entirely out of whole cloth existing only in an a temporal cyberspace, but are parasitic on the prior experiences that make them meaningful for us today" (p. 44). For N. Katherine Hayles, whom Jay cites, the apparently natural oppositions between states such as presence and absence no longer hold in our contemporary world. Virtual realities and remote simulations "flicker" between their material supports and our witnessing bodies: "They are thus ultimately dependent on the material embodiment that they seem to have left behind, especially those that interact with the human sensorium and its environment. They are, we might say, reminiscent of those other flicker-ings of information that come to us from the twinkling of the stars" (p. 44).

In another essay, the sculptor Mario Ramiro wonders what opportunities might be afforded to the artist by conditions of zero gravity. Using examples of his own levitational sculptures and Schlieren photography, he suggests that new conceptual and formal properties of space might be explored once artists are freed from the constraints of gravity. Ramiro notes that, unlike birds who can move through three different axes of space, humans primarily exist on a two-dimensional plane: "The moment it becomes a truly three-dimensional object detached from the plane, sculpture will acquire new dimensions sprung from new structural relations" (p. 106). He also observes that we tend to think of "weight" as a property owned by a specific body (such as a rock), whereas the gravitational effect is, in fact, a relationship between two or more bodies as each exerts force upon the other (e.g. the rock and the earth): "According to Dr Carl du Prel, our language masks this attraction by 'ascribing to a rock the source of the weight that is extrinsic to it'"(p. 110).

In his essay, Eduardo Kac amplifies Ramiro's review of "anti-gravitational art." Describing the work of artists like Takis and Thomas Shannon, he goes so far as to suggest: "The inevitable conclusion is that zero gravity is the next frontier" (p. 92), in particular the scope offered to artists and designers released from "gravitropism." He con-cludes: "The creation of new alloys and compounds in zero gravity and the prospect of interplanetary colonization suggest that space exploration is more than a metaphor in art. It is a physical and conceptual challenge that must be met" (p. 96).

Rachel Armstrong meditates upon alien abduction stories, astral travel, out-of-body existence and their implications for human progression. Aside from an interview conducted with a performance artist in...