La Fura del Baus
Suz/O/Suz, Sydney Showground, 1989
Alternating birth metaphors of stark, slimy beauty with moments of utter audience terror, this vastly memorable Sydney Festival extravaganza from Catalan company La Fura Dels Baus still casts a long shadow on local performance.
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Guillermo Gómez-Peña - company is called ‘Pocha Nostra’
TheMuseum of Fetishized Identities
Performance Space. Sydney, Australia (2001)
And
Performance Space. Sydney, Australia (2003)
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Aesthetic Distance (from Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion by Oliver Grau)
As the interfaces seem to dissolve and achieve more natural and intuitive designs so that the illusionary symbiosis of observer and work progresses, the more psychological detachment, the distance from the work vanishes. Without it, a work cannot be perceived as an autonomous aesthetic object. Inside the "omnipresence" of virtuality, any mechanism of knowledge acquisition will be affected and influenced. In virtual environments, a fragile, core element of art comes under threat: the observer's act of distancing that is a prerequisite for any critical reflection. Aesthetic distance always comprises the possibility of attaining an overall view, of understanding organization, structure, and function, and achieving a critical appraisal. This includes searching for hypotheses, identifications, recollections, and associations. Notwithstanding the longing for "transcending boundaries" and "abandoning the self," the human subject is constituted in the act of distancing; this is an integral part of the civilizational process. As Adorno expressed it: "distance is the primary condition for getting close to the content of a work. It is implicit in the Kantian notion of disinterestedness, which demands of the aesthetic stance that it should not seek to grasp the object…. Distance is a phenomenon of works of art that transcends their mere existence; their absolute proximity would mean their absolute integration." [22] Michel Serres points out that it is only in the fixed artwork whose elements the onlooker "sets into motion" does the spatial configuration become a vivid sensory event. [23] And in Arnold Gehlen's view, "direct emotionality of experience is held to be alien to art, and rightly so," [24] and both Hans Jonas [25] and Hartmut Boehme advance arguments against an aesthetics where distance is absent. Both thinkers stress the subject-constitutive, epistemological quality of distance, which Boehme expresses thus: "All happiness is immersion in flesh and cancels the history of the subject. All consciousness is emancipation from the flesh to which nature subjects us."[26]
The more "natural" the interfaces become. the greater the danger—not only that most of the "technological iceberg" will be inaccessible to the user who is unaware of it—that there will be an illusionary disappearance of boundaries to the data space. Increasingly powerful computers increase the suggestive potential of virtuality, which, particularly through the ideology of a "natural interface," is beginning to unfold its full psychological and manipulative influence. Against the backdrop of virtual reality's illusionism, which targets all the senses for illusion, the dissolution of the interface is a political issue.
22. Adorno (1973), p. 460.
23. Serres (1981), p. 152.
24. Gehlen ( 1986), p. 60.
25. Hans Jonas, "Der Adel des Sehens: Eine Untersuchung zur Phänomenologie der Sinne," in his (1973), pp. 198-219.
26. Bohme (1988), p. 221.
27. See Grau ( 1994), pp. 21 ff. It is already possible to experience holding a simulated beating heart in your hand, and then putting your hand inside it.
28. See Kennedy et al. (1992), pp. 295ff. To date, little research has been done on mental effects. However, one recent work is Kolasinski (1996).
29. Wertheim (1999); Anders (1998); Brew (1998), p. 79; Davis (1998), pp. 56-57; Gagnon (1998); Goldberg (1998); Heim (1998), pp. 162-167, 171.
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And from same article…
The more intensely a participant is involved, interactively and emotionally, in a virtual reality, the less the computer-generated world appears as a construction: Rather, it is construed as personal experience.
