The Disembodied Eye

Pandora's Box, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto (www.interaccess.org/pandora); Fylkingen New Music and Intermedia Art, Stockholm (www.fylkingen.se), March 2000.

If virtuality is freeing us from our bodily limits, what is the price of our liberation? In one form or another, this question dominates the emerging field of cybertheory, pitting prophets of digital transcendence against the guardians of a body that cannot be left behind. The issue has an indisputable ideological dimension, yet what is at stake, increasingly, is less simple technophilia or phobia, than the designed relations of bodies and interfaces. And this raises still more questions. Can we think of the new technologies of perception apart from the bodily senses they supplement (or replace)? What sort of self-presence does telepresence imply? Where am I when I am exploring a virtual world? How do digital prosthetics alter the boundaries of my own body image?

A recent electronic art installation, cosponsored by artist-run new media galleries in Toronto and Stockholm, framed this ongoing debate in a visual art context. Billed as "the first international interactive encounter with art using remotely controlled robots," Pandora's Box combined new technologies with the familiar thematics of spectatorship and the gaze to pose a provocative question: "What if the spectator is a cyborg?"

The simultaneous Canadian and Swedish exhibitions consisted of a collection of small-scale environments, each designed to be navigated by a robot equipped with a video camera "eye." Two large display screens projected the robot's-eye-view of the artwork in real time via an Internet link, with gallery-goers in Toronto remotely controlling the activities of the Swedish robot, and those in Stockholm manipulating its Toronto counterpart. Actual viewer interaction was limited to use of the key-pad device which operated the remote robot, offering opportunities to penetrate but not alter the artists' miniature worlds.

The worlds themselves ranged from an austere assemblage of texts and photographs by the Swedish Christian Bock to Toronto-based Victoria Scott's automated maze of flapping books, whirring metal cones, and dripping paint ladles— [Begin Page 124] a Rube-Goldberg landscape inspired, according to Scott, by her researches into alchemy and nineteenth-century spiritualist texts. The most striking pieces, however—as seen by the robot eye—were those which used video images to effect a double mediation. Canadian Francis LeBouthillier placed two video monitors in an open black glass aquarium, running front and side views of a tape loop of the artist fully submerged in a tank of water, accompanied by several large black eels. Swedish artist Dinka Pignon surrounded a single monitor with an environment of mirrors, creating multiple reflections of its constantly shifting images—a glowing, slowly revolving sphere, ghostly human figures appearing and disappearing like specters at a dance.

In both cases, the doubling of the video image—projections read by the robot's camera eye—created a paradoxical effect of immediacy, dissolving the frame of the original monitor screens and transforming the screen images into virtual presences. With almost no ability to register scale, depth, or perspective, the robot-spectator "saw" in LeBouthillier's table-top-sized assemblage a full-scale tank in which a man sat submerged—a return to the image's original—while Pignon's equally small-scale construction became a fantasy architecture, both vast and mysterious, a hall of mirrors haunted by luminous apparitions.

For exhibition curator and interface designer Graham Smith, these trompe l'oeil effects are precisely the point: an exploration of the distorted enchantments of a cyborg vision. The robots, small, beetle-like assemblies of wheels, motors, cameras, and wires become, in effect, twenty-first-century magic lanterns. Jerking their way through the installations, butting against surfaces, and occasionally marooning themselves in corners, they relay to the second-order viewers who watch them images of a reality that exists only in their camera eyes. For the human spectator, the result was a complex and layered...