[dance-tech] PANGENDER STREET-MEDIA GUERRILLA: ANTIBODIES OF SOCIAL CONTROL


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_____ARTS______TECHNOLOGY_____CRITICAL THINKING_____SOCIAL ACTION____________

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Transdisciplinary Association REVERSO__________President/Director: Jaime del 
Val____________________________

Tel:  +34 687 558 436     -      email: jaimedelval@xxxxxxxxxxx      -  
www.reverso.org __________________




PANGENDER STREET-MEDIA GUERRILLA: ANTIBODIES OF SOCIAL CONTROL

 
AMBIGUOUS GENITALS PROJECTED IN THE STREETS



MICRODANCES IN THE CITY: 

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ON THE BODY 

TO PROJECT UNCERTAIN SEXUAL ORGANS AND AMORPHOUS BODY FRAGMENTS IN THE PUBLIC 
SPACE OF THE CITY COUNTERACTING MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL AND BINARY GENDER 
NORMATIVITY






  
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PHOTOS, VIDEOS & TEXTS IN:  
www.reverso.org/Anticuerpos-DISOLUCION.htm
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ANTIBODIES of the city
_DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY POLITIC 0.01

a METAmedia METAformance by 

REVERSO___JdV / JaiVal / Jaime del Val & OLINTO  



ACTIONS IN THE STREETS OF MADRID

SUMMER 2008 

BY

REVERSO

 www.reverso.org 

 

PRESENTING FOR THE FIRST TIME THE 

MUBP:

 MOBILE UNIT FOR BODY PRODUCTION 

 



SUBVERTING THE USE OF SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS PLACED ON THE BODY TO PRODUCE AN 
AMORPHOUS INCONTROLLABLE BODY 

 

ACTIONS AGAINST THE NEW FORMS OF TOTALITARIANISM AND IMPLICIT CONTROL IN 
NEOLIBERAL SOCIETIES THAT OPERATE BEHIND THE FAÇADE OF DEMOCRACIES AND 
NATION-STATES 

 

ACTIONS AGAINST GENDER, SEXUALITY AND INTIMATE-PUBLIC BINARIES: CLAIMING AN 
INTERSEXED, PANGENDER, METASEXUAL SOCIETY AND PRODUCING A PUBLIC RELATIONAL 
PANSEXUAL BODY

 

REVERSO LAUNCHES A NEW CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE, STREET INTERVENTION AND SOCIAL 
CRITIQUE THROUGH TECHNOLOGY, IN THE CONVERGENCE OF MEDIA ARTS, MUSIC, DANCE AND 
ARCHITECTURE: A TECHNOLOGICAL, ARTISTIC AND POLITICAL EXPERIMENT.


 

 

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FIRST ACTION:

DONE in epicentre of town; Gran Via Street, Saturday 12th July 2008 from 23'00 
to 0'20. 

80 min.

 

NEXT ACTIONS JULY 2008: see www.reverso.org  - some will be done without prior 
announcement. 

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© CRÉDITS of TEXTS & PHOTOS: REVERSO_Jaime del VaL/JaiVal/JdV



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THIS SUMMER AN ANTIBODY WALKS AROUND THE STREETS OF MADRID.
MAYBE YOU WILL MEET HIR....

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THE CITY OF DESIRE: UNDOING ITS ANATOMY AND DESTINY

-YEAR ONE OF THE METABODY ERA-



Anatomy is destiny

S. Freud / Napoleon

 

Anatomy is a tecno-political fiction: UNDOING  anatomy is undoing the political 
destiny of the body.

JdV_REVERSO

 


 

ANTIBODIES_DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY POLITIC is a Metamedia Metaformance, a 
political, artistic and technological intervention/performance/action in the 
public space of the city by the group REVERSO - www.reverso.org. 

 

JdV_REVERSO use surveillance cameras on the body to decompose its anatomy and 
gender, and dishabilitate mechanisms of social control, in a unique convergence 
of dance, performance, media arts, electroacoustics, architecture and space 
interventions. A post-intimate, post-post-porn, post-posthuman, 
post-postcolonial, postqueer, performance/action/intervention.

 

A naked body walks by the streets of the city with 4 to 8 micro-surveillance 
cameras placed on the skin, projecting fragments of the body through a 
projector placed in the chest. Images become unintelligible and amorphous 
through proximity and angle of the cameras. At the same time exposed and 
illegible, the hiper-vigilated body becomes uncontrollable: amorphous, 
post-anatomic, pangender, defying binaries and categories of sexuality and 
intimacy. It moves slowly in a series of minimalist microdances, radical 
coreographies of a fragmented and multiple body-camera that defies all 
categorisation, as it appeals to the desiring look in all its diffuse and 
fragmentary potential. Its voice is processed life in a minicomputer, becoming 
a chorus of dissolving voices. Through relating to by-passers new forms of 
relation occur, new forms of public intimacy mediated by the surveillance 
camera, misused as instrument of proximity. The frontiers of anatomy, identity 
and form dissolve and the desiring look is dispersed in amorphous fragments in 
constant morphogenesis. The body projects itself as an intensive architecture 
of desire that transforms the relational body of the city.

 

An illegible, irreducible, poetic and purposeless action, with radical 
political after-effects and resonances: so does the group REVERSO denounce that 
we are all vigilated and subdued to multiple explicit and implicit norms, 
non-verbal and intensive architectures for the bodies, that we tacitly accept. 
Subverting the same technologies that constitute the norms, the vigilated body 
rebels against mechanisms of control and against the normative and disciplinary 
scaffolding of market driven management of bodies. A metapolitical experiment 
in wearable technology, an exercise in the undoing of surveillance and in 
deconstructing implicit power regimes.

  

It is the MUBP: MOBILE UNIT FOR BODY PRODUCTION, also called MUAP, MUGP or MUSP 
(MOBILE UNIT FOR ANTI-ANATOMY / GENDER / SEX PRODUCTION), an inverse 
surveillance system, a war-machine against the disciplinary social organism 
understood as apparatus of power and violence, the gender, sexuality and 
public-private binaries and the mechanisms of affective production of bodies in 
latecapitalism. An experiment of the body, of the displaced subject, of the 
dissolution of identity.

 

An uncommon cyborg that projects amorphous, post-intimate, post-public 
genitals, that projects itself in extrusions of diffuse identity and fragmented 
subjectivity, that is displaced towards the amorphous image that is no longer 
image, but pure intensity, body, antibody inoculated in the virus of serial 
affective production of bodies, that floods over the normative territories of 
the social organism. Its anatomy could fit the parameters of clinical and legal 
assignation of sex and gender but it rebels against this apparatus and its 
mechanisms of representation in order to become amorphous, intersexual, 
pangender, post-posthuman. In the disciplinary network of the city the 
projected intensities of this body curve the cartesian and binary frames 
towards new dimensions of uncertain multiplicity.

__________________________________

 

¿Freaky exhibitionists? They call it Metabody, a way of reapropriating body and 
space in the neoliberal city, a form of subversion of implicit norms and power 
mechanisms. They denounce the new forms of implicit totalitarianism in 
latecapitalism, that reproduce us as standard affective bodies in the chains of 
production and consumption, which at the same time conceal the forms of 
violence on which the economic system is based behind the hiperreal total 
screen of media that have become both embodied vision and immersive virtual 
reality, that has supplanted public and private space. Thus through leisure, 
communication and information industries new discreet, reduced and standards 
forms of life are being globally distributed, through the production of affect 
and desire, and behind the farse of "progress" and technological "liberation" 
and "democratisation". 

 

They deny appertaining to the gender binary, which they reject as the primary 
political fiction of body and affect formation, and propose a technological 
body that is post-anatomic, amorphous, metasexual and pangender, that defies 
the disciplinary social organism, or body politic, the fiction of democracy and 
the nation-state, which has become façade for hidden market operations and 
corporate interests. 

 

Instead they propose a relational, intersexed, common and public social body. 
They claim that we are all intersexuals (hermaphrodites) sine we all undergo 
the processes of clinical and discursive assignment of sex and gender according 
to arbitrary medical criteria that regard reproductive sexuality and 
heterosexual normativity. Instead they propose a diffuse body whose anatomy, in 
permanent morphogenesis, appeals the desiring look in its open potential beyond 
the gender binary, as it is dispersed in amorphous fragments of relational 
intensities, and at the same time defies the mechanisms of affective production 
of bodies, objectification, surveillance, and assimilation into market driven 
structures. Microsexual public acts, microgenders, sexual anti-organs and 
proto-masturbations for a body-architecture that produces a new kind of 
affective intensity in the city. The amorphous, pangender, metasexual body 
becomes a weapon to undo mechanisms of control and normative territories.

 

To produce an intersexual public body: intimacy is a biopolitical technology 
that closets the body in the realms of the unspeakable while it is managed by 
corporations and the State: we have to bring the processes of body production 
out of the neoliberal and normative closet, liberate its code. The Metabody 
would be an intermediate, intersticial body, of projected, affective, non 
verbal intensities, a common body with no place for the intimate private-divide.

 

The images of the hipervigilated body, that has become amorphous and 
uncontrollable, are projected on the immaculate and fake surfaces of the 
system, on the impenetrable total screen, opening black holes of uncertainty. 
The actions are not explicitly sexual or pornographic, yet they linger on the 
edge of explicit sexuality and pornography, thus challenging their conditions 
of possibility, their domain of operation. This way multiple questions are 
raised concerning the limits of intimacy, gender, identity, sex, sexuality, 
sexual work and pornography, of the legal and viable, of the social organism as 
a whole, of the human versus the inhuman, the animal, the machine, of the lives 
that are worth respecting and living. An excercise in radical ecology for 
relational bodies-territories beyond the binary frameworks of speculation, 
virtualisation, subjectivation and norm.

 

They are REVERSO - www.reverso.org, a pioneering initiative in the conjuntion 
of body-territory, arts, technology, critical theory and political action.

 

POST-ANATOMICAL BODIES

Anatomy and matter are to be understood as a tecno-political fictions, products 
 of representation technologies. These can be challenged through radical 
interventions in the technology par excellance of production of anatomies, 
matter and objetivity: THE CAMERA. Through subversion of the technology of the 
camera it is possible to produce a post-anatomical body that questions the 
foundations of social organisation. In the place of the social disciplinary 
organism, a social relational body would emerge, diffuse, intensive, amorphous, 
that would attempt to make inviable the very technologies and conditions of 
possibility of power, subjection and objectification.

 

Amidst technocultures that reproduce us as standard bodies, of normative spaces 
and territories colonised by speculation, the reverse spaces of the city and 
the subliminal body of the performer come together as a new intensity that 
generates an uncertain body-space, in the frontier of the speakable, metabodies 
that defy standardisation and assimilation in the society of control.

 

Foucaultian Don Quixote, Deleuzian Zarathustra, Proustian Ulysses: a form of 
protest that brings together transdisciplinary artistic practices, new 
technologies, critical thinking and political action. A mobile 
micro-opera/ballet/theatre guerrilla. A micro-theatre, micro-Recherche of the 
body. A visual, sound, architectural and coreographic intervention in the body 
of the city and the postglobal social organism. A form of technoterrorism 
against discursive and formal boundaries of social norms and hidden power 
networks. A war machine against implicit forms of domination in latecapitalist 
times. A guerrilla for the undoing of gender, sexuality and intimate-public 
binaries. A sabotàge of implicit processes of affective production of bodies in 
neoliberal society. And at the same time an irreducible poetic metasignificant 
gesture, a radical coreography that defies reduction to interpretation, a 
metaformance open to contingency, an apparatus for affective production of 
anti-bodies. 

 

DISSOLUTION OF THE BODY POLITIC  proposes interventions in entire cities 
throughout periods of weeks or months, going through different aspects of the 
anatomy of the  city and the body politic. From museums and theatres to 
surveillance cameras and advertisements, in courts and prisons, highways and 
other infrastructures, military camps, embassies and consulates, political 
parties, parliaments, ministries and other organisms of administration, ONG's 
commercial centres, global corporations, tourist areas, cathedrals and 
churches, rivers, industrial areas, business areas, centre of town, areas 
subject to speculation and gentrification, airports, ports, stations, 
urbanisations, nuclear stations, mines, phone antennas, public transport, 
residential areas, marginal sex areas and gay ghettos... The amorphous public 
genitals projected onto the façades of the system inoculate an antibody for the 
latecapitalist virus of affective body production: exorcisms of the zombie 
society that operates behind the façade of "sovereign subjects" and "civil 
rights".

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

ANTIBODIES is an hommàge to the first performance that we know of, done by 
Diogenes of Sinope in the 3rd Century b.c. (2.300 years b.m.e. -before Metabody 
Era) in which he walked around the city naked inside a winecube, with a lantern 
looking for someone worth attention, and to his public masturbations. It is 
also an hommàge to the Public Genitals Project and the Near Legibility Project 
by Sandy Stone. To the Videoman of Fernando Llanos, to the Suspensions in 
public spaces and exoskeletons of Stelarc, to Steve Mann's wearable projects, 
to Hannah Villiger's photography and Pedro Garhel's performances, to the 
Graffiti Research Lab, to street artists, street dancers and activists, to Pat 
Califia and her defense of public sex, To Antonin Artaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, 
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Donna 
Haraway, the cyberfeminists, queer and postqueer, porn and post-porn activists, 
sex-workers, and those who have prepared the arena for the philosophical and 
political framework of the project. To Guillermo Gomez Peña, for being a 
"postcolonial intellectual"...

 

 

ANTIBODIES is an independent initiative by REVERSO, a pioneering initiative in 
the conjuntion of body-territory, arts, technology, critical theory and 
political action, which started in 2000 as the first journal of queer theory in 
Spanish. Since 2001 REVERSO has developed and presented extensively in Europe 
and America performance, dance & technology, electroacoustics and virtual 
architecture projects as well as critical theory research and published 
numerous essays in print and online publications. They organise since 2003 the 
Nomad Workshop of the Technologies of the body, a transdisciplinary space of 
education, production and exchange. Since 2004 Jaime del Val/JdV/JaiVal leads 
several important fronts in the fight against urban speculation in Spain, 
having had politically and socially significant achievements in paralysing 
large illegal urbanisation projects in the coast of Almeria, in southern Spain. 
In 2009-10 the first REVERSO centre will open in a large country house in 
process of refurbishing, in a small village one hour and a half away from 
Madrid, in the province of Salamance. JdV/JaiVal -before called Jaime del Val- 
pangender metasexual media artist, theorist and activist, is founding director. 
OLINTO, colombian artst, is hir partner and collaborator.

 

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INSTRUCTIONS: use surveillance cameras and wearable equipment on the naked body 
to project amorphous body fragments and processed voice in the streets, undo 
the anatomy of the social body and establish new kinds of amorphous, 
relational, public, common and intersticial, pangender, metasexual bodies while 
resisting gender binarisms and current mechanisms of control, standardisation, 
assimilation and affective production of bodies in latecapitalism.

posthumana, post-postcolonial.
 

 

Contact: Jaime del Val/JdV/JaiVal  - Tel: +34 687 558 436 - 
jaimedelval@xxxxxxxxxxx 







WWW.REVERSO.ORG

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