I am becoming something else. In this moment, this being-in-transition, I am willfully stepping into the unknown. I am between realities. I can only imagine what I want to become, and then choose to become that new thing, but it is radically ungraspable, inconceivable. I can never know the reality of what I am choosing to become, desiring to become. My decision to transform can never be the right one, because it is always based on an illusion, a fantasy, a false conception with only a few points of data, not the rich details of an embodied life. As the transformation unfolds, those unknown events begin to occur, like seeing my breasts in the mirror for the first time after shaving my chest closely, feeling the movement in my orgasm change into something new or just walking down the street for a moment as a girl, unnoticed and not needing any special attention. My decision to become something else is always a decision to become mythopoetic, because the reality of the new state is always unknown, imaginary, a construct, a fantasy. Yet I don’t seek to decry this radical state of uncertainty but to embrace it. The very moments of everyday perception are also simply intersections of a real materiality with my symbolic and imaginary processing engines making sense of them, down to the way that I understand what pleasure is and what pain is and when the two become too close so as to be confused. And a choice to not transform is of course still a choice to transform into a different state, as our bodies are all in permanent transition, aging, training, consuming, producing, perceiving, creating new folds in our craniums.
Through this process, I am also becoming an artist. Yet this is simply another fantasy which I use to structure my desires and find direction. Artist, porn star, student, professor, father, mother, husband, wife, lover, child, priest, these are all simply performances of being, yet their being a performance makes them no less real, nor more real, just another fold in the swirling interplay, the kaleidoscope of realities that is our being.
While one can draw one’s fantasy, or write it out in words, 3D virtual worlds bring us one step closer to seeing in front of our eyes the fantasy films which play behind our eyes, yet there are many more steps to bring us closer to dreams. In my dreams I smell, I feel my body in action, I have visceral emotions, yet software such as Second Life is far from emulating such unreal realities. Still, we can make steps closer to dreams, with motion capture, head mounted displays, tactile interfaces, wish pressure interfaces. I wish for another reality, the electricity on my skin changes, transferring the new desired location to the system, and the pressure interface responds, as my chair morphs from a car seat to a comfy recliner in my skybox…loading world…arriving.
August 8th, 2009 at 9:43 am
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August 8th, 2009 at 9:44 am
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August 8th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
“A mixed reality performance is a misnomer, as every step of our waking lives is a mix of realities, our self-perceptions, muscle memory, proprioceptions…”
..such a beautifully-rendered point, azdel. + i’m intrigued by the/ur notion of the _Mythopoetic_ in relation 2 synthetic ecosystems: how continual formation/construction/rewriting of process-centered input must effect myths + persona[l] ide[a]ntity narratives? previous 2 encountering ur work, i’d associated the phrase “Becoming Dragon” with the book/movie _Silence of the Lambs_: a destructive mythopoesis underlined by abortive/psychotic shape/gender states. thank_u 4 over/re:writing that with such a powerfully sensitive em_body_ment.
-mez
August 9th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I think of mythopoetic in terms of imaginary or fictional, mostly. I originally found the term in Ricardo Dominguez’s performance classes where he discusses how durational and ritual performances can reveal the mythopoetic rules of society, the unspoken, unwritten rules that govern daily behavior. What comes to mind are Adrian Piper’s catalysis performances
http://blog.art21.org/2009/05/07/the-power-of-now-adrian-pipers-indexical-present/
or Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=37615&category=34030
as amazing pieces that do that. So in a way, by performing Dragon as my gender, I’m attempting to reveal the mythical/fictional/imaginary nature of male and female as genders. But at the same time, doing so in a space like Second Life, I think, shows how we can embrace mythopoesis not in the sense of making new myths for people to follow, but in the sense of the original greek meaning of story telling:
[From Greek mūthopoios, composer of fiction, from mūthopoiein, to relate a story : mūthos, story + poiein, to make; see kwei-2 in Indo-European roots.]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mythopoetic
i want to become mythopoetic in the sense that with virtual worlds, we are writing new stories, constructing new realities outside of the boundaries of the old limitations, in the way that scifi presages scientific developments but much faster, in that we are living in the stories as we’re telling them.
this response is already too long but i also think of becoming mythopoetic or becoming imaginary as a way of rejecting the real/unreal dichotomy that has plagued trans people for so long and is still used to undermine our agency and identities. to sidestep that whole binary and queer it and say that i’m not trying to be real, i’m transreal, between realities, between fiction and nonfiction.
thanks for the comment! interesting questions…
(and i didn’t even know there was a dragon story in silence of the lambs, thats awful, that film is such a clear example of how the media characterizes trans people as criminal and crazy)