This Raised Fist: Cyborgian Tale on Google Wave

HASTAC Scholar Short: This Raised Fist: A Cyborgian Tale?

Time: 3:00:00

Day: 4/15/2010

Location: Pre-Recorded

Abstract: In the documentary film, Derrida, French philosopher Jacques Derrida expands on his theorization of the role of hands. Commenting on his previous works on touch and sight, Derrida maintains that hands—gestures and motions—work as a point of recognition and signifies the evolution of “man.” Following Derrida’s theorization,” The Story Hands Tell” documents through digital video, the role of hands in student activism and democratic participation. Specifically, this in-progress experimental documentary connects to the HASTAC Conference’s theme of global innovation and questions the ways the next generation of digital technologies alter personal, institutional, and geographic boundaries. In particular, “The Story Hands Tell” offers a digital visual depiction of narrativity as told through hands, unfolding in the 2009 student strikes at the University of California, Berkeley. Focusing on hands, “The Story Hands Tell” attempts to depict the changing role of the body through technologies in democratic participation. On one level, the protests could resemble footage from the 1960’s Free Speech Movement where students raised banners and signs, held one another, and formed fists raised in the air. On the other hand, the story of the 2009 student strikes take another turn through digital technologies: students held their cell phones, texted via Twitter, and recorded footage with digital cameras. This short presentation of in-progress student work attempts to engage with issues highlighted by scholars and artists, such as Henry Jenkins, Wendy Hui Kyung Chun, and Mark Tribe on new media art and digital political participation. Moreover, this in-progress experimental documentary depicts an altering of personal, physical, and institutional boundaries, as footage of the strikes travels past nation-state borders and as citizen-subjects participate through digital means. By provoking questions around the role of technology, new media, and democratic participation, “The Story Hands Tell” experiments with and questions notions of “documentary,” “technology,” and “humanity,” through footage of the 2009 University of California, Berkeley Student Strikes.

Speaker: Margaret Rhee

Bio: Margaret Rhee is completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies, with planned designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She receivedher M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University in 2008 with a thesis entitled: “Man Made”: Deconstructing Media Representations of the Virginia Teach Tragedy”. Margaret is a member of the 2009-2010 cohort of HASTAC Scholars.

So excited to see it Margaret! Everyone who is here, Margaret co-hosted an awesome forum on Queer & Feminist Media Spaces. An AMAZING conversation and well worth reading: http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/queer-feminist-new-media-spaces

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3:34 pm

Me:

Margaret, that short was fantastic. It seems like a wonderful project. Both Heidegger and Derrida talk about the hand but it is interesting how little else is written on the hand metaphor relative to the fist, the protest, as opposed to the extension of the tool (conceptually). Does the cyborg hand raise itself in protest? I wonder, literally, if the current generation of neuron-powered cyborg hands can even make the fist gesture--to fight, to protest. If it does, is it a weapon? (These are legal issues.) Your video really makes me think. I'm also reminded of a daguerreotype I once found in a junk shop, back when I was writing on 19th century photography, of a very prim and matronly looking white woman, posing in the classic formal photographic pose of the time, looking entirely unexceptional . . . except one hand was either clad in a skin-tight black leather glove and suffered some kind of disease that blew it up, sausage like, or it was a wooden hand in a tight leather glove. I will never know which, but the white hand and the black larger, gloved or cyborg hand was haunting and powerful. Thanks for your evocative presentation, Margaret.

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3:27 pm

Amber.buck24@googlewave.com:

Hi Margaret! I'm watching your presentation right now. I'm the HASTAC scholar reporting on your session, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

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3:48 pm

Amber.buck24@googlewave.com:

I'm a graduate student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and we went on strike in November, so the shots of the protests were great, and very much like what I experienced here in November. Digital representations were also a large part of our event; images on Flickr and video on Youtube went up directly after each event. The administration countered primarily through mass emails to the student body.

Like Cathy, I'm also interested in your focus on the cyborg hand. What it reminded me of, strangely, was Adrienne Rich's sonnet sequence, "21 Love Poems." She followed the Petrarchan convention of a focus on the body parts of the love interest, but instead of focusing on lips, for example, she focused on hands. This focus turned the love interest from an object into a subject, someone who was an actor in the world.

I appreciate your focus on the embodied actor, someone making a statement by their presence in a physical space, but also inserting their voices, through multimedia content into another space that moves the protest (or performance) beyond that local space.

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4:08 pm

Alan:

It's great to see the HASTAC scholars involved with the conference!

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4:14 pm

Maureen.engel@googlewave.com:

This project looks so interesting Margaret. One of the things that struck me as I was watching is the relationship of the hand to the voice -- the way the hand has often traditionally reinforced the voice in protest. What happens when that voice gets distributed from the chant to the tweet, and does that same change mean something similar for hands?