Note: The work of photographer Linda Dawn Hammond, as referred to and presented in Spasm, is from the THREE PART BODYSERIES- a series of triptych portraits. The "digitally remade face" which appears on the cover and throughout the book is derived from the triptych, "Francis". Kroker's analysis of the work and personalities depicted in the series, while interesting and poetic, does not necessarily reflect the opinion nor the intent of the artist herself. The triptychs were intended to be viewed together, not segmented, as they appeared in the book.
Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh
by Arthur Kroker
©1993, New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series Montreal: New World Perspectives, ISBN 0-920393-35-7 Published simultaneously in the USA by St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-31209-681-X
Spasm
by Arthur Kroker
... Here, virtual reality finally speaks for itself through a series of stories about a floating world of digital reality: floating tongues, noses, sex, skin, ears, and smells. Spasm, therefore, as a theory of virtual reality: its mood (vague), its dark, prophetic outriders (three android processors: a sampler musician, a recombinant photographer, and a suicide machine performer), its ideology (the fusion of biology and mathematics as the command language of recombinant culture), and its cultural horizon ("scenes from recombinant culture") ...
Excerpt From- http://www.nwpbooks.com/bottom/excerpt/spasmexc/sp1a.html
Spasm
by Arthur Kroker
Spasm: Riders of the Crash Zone
Chapter 1 (Part 2)
Spasm is, in part, the story of the dark outriders of virtual reality. Three individuals- Steve Gibson, Linda Dawn Hammond, and David Therrien - who, like Old Testamentprophets wandering in the desert, are the new rugged individualists travelling through the sprawl of the digital frontier of the Year 2000. A music hacker, who rides the crash zone of sampler technology to bring back the sounds of the body recombinant. A body hacker, who records in her photography the coming shape-shifters of digital reality. And a high-voltage electro hacker, who has reinvented his body as a suicide machine, half-flesh/half-metal, in the desert of Arizona...
...It was a typical cold winter night at Foufounes Electriques in Montreal, a kind of Blade Runner bar where primitivism meets high tech and where bodies go to download into music. Gwar was performing, you know the band that likes to advertise itself as "twelve ex-art students from Virginia" - whatever that means - and who specialize in sacrificial blood rites: hosing down their audience with simu-blood, chopping off papier-mâché penises, and goat butting. In other words, an all-American band. In the midst of the pandemonium, I noticed a photographer, Linda Dawn Hammond, right at stage level calmly taking pictures. She came dressed for the occasion with a see-through plastic raincoat over black leather, blood red hair, and Camden Town heavy-stud leather boots. As I found out later, while her Gwar photographs were interesting, this was just a job on the way to her real work: a spectacular, and perfectly unknown, photography project - 3-Part Body Series - that captured, in a haunting, deeply evocative way, the fetishistic rituals of crash bodies occupying the outlaw margins of virtual reality. Like a Dianne Arbus of cyberspace, but only better, Hammond's photography was the truth-sayer of body hackers who travel as shape-shifters across the digital galaxy...
...In part, Spasm is about these three deeply
romantic figures, working in isolation and certainly outside the
canons of official culture. Their works are perfect screens for our
violent descent into the speed space of virtual reality. To the
extent that virtual reality is a global aesthetic, occupying no
specific territory but invading all of space and time, these artists
are the pioneers of the swiftly emerging digital frontier, dark
outriders of hacker culture who recover in advance the android
sounds, recombinant photographs and burning electronic flesh of
digital technology...
Excerpt From-
http://www.nwpbooks.com/bottom/excerpt/spasmexc/sp1b.html
Note: The work of photographer Linda Dawn Hammond, as referred to and presented in Spasm, is from the THREE PART BODYSERIES- a series of triptych portraits. The "digitally remade face" which appears on the cover and throughout the book is derived from the triptych, "Francis". Kroker's analysis of the work and personalities depicted in the series, while interesting and poetic, does not necessarily reflect the opinion nor the original intent of the artist herself. The triptychs were intended to be viewed together, not segmented as they appeared in the book.
Linda Dawn Hammond is a portrait artist of body parts: especially the toes, heads, and stomachs of Montreal's body outlaws who inhabit the psychological territory of the sprawl, that forgotten hard urban edge from Tokyo and Hong Kong to Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam where bodies are surplus matter to the operation of the techno-galaxy.
3-Part Body Series, Hammond's most prophetic photography, consists of twenty-four vertical studies of body parts in the sprawl. Hammond does not exempt herself from this photographic inquisition, but makes of her own body, personality, and camera a floating body part, forcing each of her subjects to reveal their favorite fetish and then editing the fetishized body into seering images, complete with layered painting (itself a fetishized reminder of cynical time) and large-scale mounting on mylar sheets (a sign-fetish of cynical space). The result is a neo-classical optic on the body in ruins: severed heads, distended bellies, arching toes, oiled skin, pirouetting necks, pierced
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nipples, chained feet. Hers is a photographic sampler machine that operates as a big, but delicately nuanced, reality editor, feeding on the fetishized bodies of street people, her own as well, and producing in turn a cold romantic vision of our trajectory towards a stellar universe of body parts. Everyone comes to the fin de siecle party that is Hammond's 3-Part Body Series: Charlie might be paralyzed and trapped in a speed-metal wheelchair but he comes for the fete complete with an upper body armoured with muscle and inert feet wrapped in chains, topped off with the fascinating sign of the wolf-fetish. Jimi Imij, who is one of the best of all the panic hairdressers at Coupe Bizzarre, throws up his head to the sky like a luminescent Madonna; Darryl appears at the fetish party under the happy sign of a dancing sado-masochist (his body movements perfectly cut to the mood of his leather-collar neck and the chain twined through his fingers); Kim makes her photographic entrance rubbing the old-fashioned signifier of fishnet against ripped steel-tipped workboots; even Garth strips down to reveal an oiled body, all the more beautiful for its veneer of the flesh sacred; and, finally, Pierre makes of his body an endless sign-slide between snakes and cocks.
Mix and Match Bodies
Hammond can be such an observant student of sampler culture as a big fetish party because she is the photographer par excellence of mix and match bodies, of that digital reality where the body is blown across the social field, and dispersed into swirling eddies of body parts. Here, the body has a surface veneer of unity, but an underlying reality of radical dismemberment. The mix and match body, therefore, as the new body type for the age of recombinant culture, that era in which the body is
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already surplus matter to its own techno-skin. In Hammond's photography there is no trace of nostalgia for the fictitious concrete unity of the old modernist body, and certainly no hint of a happy conspiracy of interests between seemingly opposing tendencies towards decomposition and recovery. Instead, we are confronted with photographic thermographs of the ecstasy of decomposition, sacrificial scenes where the fetishistic debris of the mediascape is sampled as a way of transforming the irreality of body bits into an indifferent, but no less charming, universe of circus performances.
Perhaps it might be said that Hammond is the Dianne Arbus of the body mutant. With this difference. Whereas Arbus photographed the hidden world of circus freaks for their incipient signs of transgressionary value, thus evoking the excluded and silenced values of bourgeois culture, Hammond photographs the freak within, the freak fetishist. Not excluded freaks, but the subjectivity of the freak triumphant as a resurgent sign of the return of the body from its electronic dissimulation and disappearance. And not freaks as a symbol of transgression, but of the impossibility of transgression. Hammond's imaginary landscape of fetish freaks revels in the world of the techno-mutant: they are the advanced architects of a sampler culture where the body knows no other existence than to be at the disappearing centre of the modernist antinomies. Designer freaks who make of the text of their flesh a cynical sign of the disappearance of the body.
In Hammond's liquid photography we can finally see the future of sequenced bodies. Not concrete bodies trapped in the optical carceral of the camera, but an image-reservoir of processed bodies fragmented into floating heads, bellies, and feet that are unified only by totemic fetishes. Some of these fetishes include a Barbie Doll, a tattoo, a ring piercing male nipples, and among others a ripped pair of fishnet stockings. A photographic
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Photo of Charlie
(Three Part Bodyseries) - Feet (Part C)
Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond
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DANCING SKULLS
scanner of shock-wave personalities who have already broken through to the next frontier of recombinant culture, resignifying themselves as fetishistic hybrids. Outlaw bodies living in the psychological space of a new techno-bohemia, undertake an inner migration into the imaginary landscape of the fetish. As a result, the fetish makes a triumphant return, not under the old psychoanalytical sign of repressed sexual anxieties, but as a charmed talisman guiding us into the new continent of the recombinant body. That is, the body as a spinning combinatorial of cynical signs, as equenced body given temporary definition by decorating its orifices and protuberances with a violent, but fascinating code of primitive mythology.The body recombinant, then, recovering a maximal amount of materiality, dirty materiality, by turning random body parts into sites of cold-eyed fetishes: oiled skin, big toes, splayed eyeballs, upturned profiles, dancing skulls.
The body recombinant is mutating faster and faster now, spinning off a dizzying array of mutations. Crash bodies possessing no necessary politics nor ultimate meanings, only a violently speeded-up search for the perfect look. A techno-body fit for Cyber-Parties from San Francisco to New York where smart drugs, like ecstasy, and a full moon provide the setting for a massive convening of crash bodies. Fetish skins who celebrate their indefinite acceleration into a dense matrix of body parts by donning this month's fashionable screen-effect. Fully cinematic bodies who transform every orifice into a spectral special effect: screen-image eyes, digitally scanned ears, architecturally layered hair, tattooed heads, stud lips. A carnival of decomposition (of the old body) where the past rituals of fetishism are first scavenged for their totemic signs, and then hard-wired into the skin of techno-mutants as its emblematic screen-effect.
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Photo of Francis
(Three Part Bodyseries) - Head (Part A)
Photo: Linda Dawn Hammond
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BARBIE GETS A PENIS
Hammond's photography, therefore, is a genetic sequencer of the body mutant. Thinking through to the vanishing centre of the body recombinant&emdash; its production of hybrid bodies populated by dismembered, floating personalities&emdash; her photographic optic clearly displays the combinatorial logic of the latest generation of sequenced bodies. No longer passive recombinants scanned by the mediascape or mutant hybrids, these bodies are playfully indifferent circus androids, a carnival of outlaw bodies, who fetishize the question of sexual identity itself.
In Hammond's imagination, we actually probe the future of the sequenced personality, and find a doubled moment. Part floating recombinants, but also part ritualistic gesture. Techno-mutants that make of themselves photographic hybrids, all the more to be redoubled under the ambivalent sign of the floating fetish. Not a return to romanticism where fetishistic resignification would represent a recovery from a fatal decomposition, but some thing very different. A cultural combinatorial where tendencies towards decompositon and recovery splay outwards simultaneously, migrating across the opposite pole as a privileged moment of sacrificial violence.
No longer a world of romantic primitivism, but primitive recombinants. These are the first of all the bimodern bodies, reclaimed at the violent edge of simulation and primitivism. Here, the fetish is a charmed talisman, taking us directly into the doubled logic of the virtual body.
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