A hybrid cause towards intermedial activism

Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s work revolves around a multi-faceted mission to exorcize various –isms through an artistic palette which consists of music genres, theatre, literature, videos and especially radical activism. Gomez-Peña’s confrontational spoken art appeals to various types of people and does not limit his audience to a Latin American demographic, nor does it limit them to being a simple viewer. In works such as The Couple in the Cage (1993), Gomez-Peña collaborates with interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco posing as an undiscovered Amerindian couple displayed in a cage for the public to consume. Ultimately, their video is built around the audiences’ responses and remarks, allowing the public to script the project. His manifested website, La Pocha Nostra, combines all aspects of his performance art in partnership with his team (a trans-disciplinary arts organization) as well to promote a ‘conceptual institute of hybrid art’.

Corina Pilay

Cosmetic Cyborgery

This advertisement for a cosmetic surgery company located in New York, conducted in a Slavic language and using entirely digitized images, is ripe with themes of intermediality and interculturality.  Specifically, I will speak about how the electronic media used to create the ad (computer generation) and to distribute the ad (the internet) acts as a metanarrative concerning the impact of electronic media on the body and embodiment. 

In the words of Vivian Sobchack in her book Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture (University of California Press, 2004), “the electronic tends to marginalize and trivialize the human body,” while the current obsession with cosmetic surgery and  extreme physical fitness in the age of electronic media shows a desire to change and reconstitute the body as something less vulnerable, less mortal. In the true nature of the cyborg, this advertisement alienates us from our own bodies, by refusing to allow the viewer to identify with anything at all in-the-flesh. Thus, the viewer is asked to identify with a computer-generated version of herself (targeted at women, this ad presents a normative – read white, young, middle-to-upper class – version of woman, an every-woman). This ad exemplifies the proliferation of body-alteration through such methods as cosmetic surgery, a rise in the cyborgification of our selves, and the way in which such an altered body can “interface with the electronic network and maintain a significant – if altered – material presence in the digitized lifeworld of the subject” (Sobchack).

Claire Sanford