Networked Bodies in Cyberspace: Orchestrating the Trans-Subjective in the Video Artworks of Natalie Bookchin

Abstract

For decades, discussions of the impacts of technology on the material body have featured prominently in post-humanist discourse. From Donna Haraway's oft-cited “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) to Katherine Hayles's How We Become Post-Human (1999) to Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work (2009), an uneasy relationship exists between the networked, electrified, mechanical functionality of computational systems and the material or “meat” bodies of human users of those systems. Whether embracing the potentials or decrying the alienation of “humanity” brought about by the affective gap between the sensual body and the networks it engages by the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keyboards, anxiety continues to surface relative to how we perceive ourselves as corporeal beings in a largely flattened, detached, and fragmented cybernetic world.