Stahl Stenslie
http://www.cicv.fr/SYNESTHESIE/SYN3/sens.html
Click: Toucher
Then click : Stahl Stenslie
Thus when the God, whatever God was he,
Had form'd the whole, and made the parts agree,
That no unequal portions might be found,
He moulded Earth into a spacious round:
Then with a breath, he gave the winds to blow;
And bade the congregated waters flow.
–Ovid
To live in France, and to think about sexuality, perversion, mutilation
and death, is to situate myself within a paradoxical canon of 'the
tradition of the avant-garde.' De Sade can be seen as this tradition's
prime mover of course, but it has been faithfully extended into the
twentieth century at greater or lesser degrees of intensity by writers
like Anais Nin and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This tradition has also received
extra contemporary momentum through the writings of nouveau philosophers
like Georges Bataille, a thinker whose works were introduced to the
Anglo-American intelligentsia via Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and the
Tel Quel 'movement' (itself perhaps one of the latest blossoms of this
avant-garde heritage of transgression). Early in the century entire
artistic movements inhabited this essentially Sadean territory and
explored or transformed it with gusto, the most notable being the
Surrealists. Now it is VR's turn. Thus may I present……
**TACTILE TECHNOLOGIES
"At the end of the millennium," Stahl Stenslie writes, "the body has
turned into a multi-sensorial schizoid corpus. It is on the one hand a
single, unitary, physical object with a life span of approximately 70
years, and on the other hand it has done the quantum jump into a
synthetic transcendental, multiple self of mediated realities." The
question is no longer what or who I am, but all that I can be.
The idea of the body in cyberspace is both an old and a new one. It is
old with respect to the fantastical aspects projectable into the
qualities of an ideal body - this we know from any kind of fantasy
fiction. On the other hand it is radically new through its
personification within the virtual reality of interactive, computer
constructed environments.
The art of Stahl Stenslie concerns the virtual body. He strives for the
"tabula rasa" of the body where all can be rewired anew, and to redefine
and explore the body and its many senses within the context of new
media. He sees the body - including personality - as a construction. The
body as we have come to know it no longer exists for him - as new
technologies allow us to perceive and experience the body in radically
new ways.
"The body of the future depends more upon context, presentation and
abstraction than ever before. The emerging replicant techno-body is
continuously resampling itself at hyper speed, disintegrating and
recombining itself more according to principles of multiple sense lust
than to principles of necessity. The cyb-erotic is the new libido."
Stahl spake.
[…]
Tactile Technologies (TT) is about expanding upon the perceptual limits
of technology. Focusing on bodily sensations and stimuli, TT brings the
body back to digital perception. TT takes a holistic approach to media
and mediated experiences, recombining the body + cognition + hardware
into new contexts and situations.
Within networks your hands use the keyboard as input and control device
- and your eyes depend on the monitor for feedback. Perception ought to
involve more than fingers and eyes, and it is time to do away with the
last hindering for the digital cyborg: the body. Without a possibility
of complete corporal emergence into computer mediated experiences and
environments the digital highway to "info-heaven" and networked
communication will fail.
Check out - http://www.gar.no/sec for more infor on his upcoming project
"Solve et Coagula." If you went to DEAF in Rotterdam (9.17 - 9.23)
you saw his group project "sense:less." Sense:less was a first
step in the direction of what he will do with "SeC".
