Oron Catts
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Re:Transvergence 1 - Short Summary introduction - 2006/05/03 15:40
Inke asked us to respond to the following question: Could you, Oron and Ionat, please talk about responsibility, and could you describe the consequences of what you are calling the „extended body“?
The issue of responsibility is very important for our practice as well as to development of a new discourse concerning the fragments of life.
When one encounter these ferments in an industrial or biomedical setting they are objectified, instrumentalised or simply treated as raw materials for (more often then not) the production of wealth – their actual function, source and ethical rights seems to be secondary to their profit potential. The idea of developing the concept of the extended body is to attempt to look at these (semi) living fragments as something else, something the require care and attenuation. As the extended body is product of technology gone biological the notion the responsibility and duty of care should be in the forefront. In addition, the current taxonomy of life still based on Judeo-Christian creation and hierarchical concepts might not be the most appropriate tool to deal with the semi-living.
So here we have an instrumentalised, hierarchical story that needs to be dismantled and debunk through the idea of the extend body. It is, as mentioned, an ontological device that we use on a phenomenological level with our work (see www.tca.uwa.edu.au ) and on a theoretical level through our texts.
Oron
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