Aphasia and Parrhesia: Code and Speech in the Neural Topographies of the Net

PAPER submitted by Christina McPhee, independent new media artist (US)

SUMMARY This paper allegorizes traumatized visualization and speech as an electronic topology.

Keywords: media, allegory, cyborg, algorithm, entropy, trauma, iconoclash, atopia, amygdala

ABSTRACT

A cyborg consciousness within the neural net is contemplated as coextensive with the net itself. If the brain and the cyborg-networked landscape are self-reflexive subjects, then we may model a space, a neural atopia, wherein synapses will set and reset in an entropy cycle, and, continually generating code variations, will reach a critical threshold of complexity, beyond which it degrades and entraps like a left hemisphere stroke. This paper allegorizes traumatized visualization and speech as an electronic topology. The signal feature of Aphasia is a fugue state, expressed as recursive, perseverant, garbled speech patterns caused by aneurysm or traumatic shock. If the cyborg’s aphasia is contemplated as “fearless speech”, or parrhesia, iconoclasm and algorithm mesh in the dark space (amygdala) of a neural-electronic universe.

This paper addresses the problematic of semi-autonomous agency and free speech as a function of acute entropy within the cultural landscape of the neural net. Surrounding a critique of the modernist myth of the feminine machine entity, Foucault’s observations of unequal power relations as a signal characteristic of parrhesia here dwell within an extended allegory on electronic language, whose special syntax within this imaginary of trauma develops from video and sound recordings of aphasic speech and fibreoptic surgical interventions for emergent stroke. This discourse, dependent as it is on realms of scientific visualization and representation as well as cultural criticism, draws extensively from the recent ICONOCLASH exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe with excursions into Documenta XI. The paper, as a whole, serves as an extended gloss on my current art/science collaborative project Aphasia/Ellipsis, a digital performance installation with live and online emulations, produced in collaboration with sound artist Matt Rogalsky (Canada), stroke neurophysiologist Marilyn Rymer, MD (US), and virtual environments designer Shane Carroll (US). Finally, I engage a dialectic between algorithm and allegory, between code driven aesthetics and iconophilia. The electronic topology inspires critical reflection on iconoclasm, traumatic memory, and the aesthetics of identity in the realm of hypermedia.

©Christina McPhee 2002

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