casaluce - geiger/synusi@ virus cyborg

Italian- Austrian artist who adopts a poliedric and explorative approach.
She has conceived the synusi@ virus cyborg as a possible extention of the multi- self in a mutant dimension. In the last years she has been curating the synusi@ blog on DROME where she invites artists, intellectuals, film directors, and other personalities working in the extended cultural field, to play with her personal method of identity deconstruction. She presents and forges for the first time the `posthuman actionism' as an further experimental research- work in progress.

Post-human Actionism
How can we express the theoretical and practical horizon opened by the reflection about the post-human? And yet which kind of expressive forms are functional to the challenges posed by this reflection?
Any reflection about the post-human, if we exclude some angelistic drifts, is a reflection about our body, an entity that we are used to define, following a long metaphysical tradition, through its radical opposition to what, conversely, is supposed to fit into the spiritual domain.
Post-humanism reworks this distinction showing that there is no such a radical opposition between the men's natural (e.g the body) and cultural (the spirit) side. Man is, irremediably, an historical Being, the outcome of incessant hybridizations, contaminations, and mutations, which are responsible for the emergence of a body-praxis, a body made of practices, setting in motion our own political and expressive policies.
To constitutively grasp how decisive our limbs and senses are for shaping our relationship with the world, with the Others, and, at last, with ourselves is one of the advantages of those expressive forms unfolding themselves before and from the body.
The Vienna Actionism, among other movements like the Body Art, has been full aware of these potentialities. After all, the divide between form and matter has been imposed by a particular tradition of thought and must be totally rejected from within the horizon of post-humanism.
However, the post-human actionism proposed by Casaluce-Geiger points beyond the legacy of 20th century actionism. Its aim is to represent the ways in which the body is revealing itself in the real present. The body of post-humanism - manifesting a striking proximity to many icons of science-fiction- is essentially marked by its openness towards the Otherness, understood as that technosphere in which the body happens to be, nowadays, ever more immersed.
Post-human actionism can be considered as the expressive instance of a body coming to existence -as praxis- in its commerce with the digital technologies. Instead of generating a de-materialization, these technologies are conducive to a new and more profound incorporation while, at the same time, enriching our practices, our emotional relations, and our own bodies.
This enrichment, this hybridation are both revelatory; through them, we become aware of the openness towards otherness which characterizes Us. In this way, we can finally grasp that otherness inhabits ourselves, that we are the Others, and that machines are We. (Antonio Tursi)


Antonio Tursi
Antonio Tursi (Cosenza, 1978), PhD in Theory of Informatics and Communication, has studied at the University of Rome, Macerata, Sussex, and Toronto. In Toronto, he has worked for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, where he is actually Senior Fellow. As scholar and collaborator of Alberto Abruzzese e Derrick de Kerckhove, he is mainly engaged in the new media, investigating their expressive and political dimensions through a cross-disciplinary approach. Besides many articles, he wrote Internet e il Barocco. L'opera d'arte nell'era della sua digitalizzazione (Roma, 2004) and edited Dopo la democrazia (with de Kerchkove, Milan 2006) and Post-umano (with Mario Pireddu, Milan, 2006). His new work, Estetica dei nuovi media. Forme espressive e network society, will be published in two months.

posthuman actionism
(2000/2006 work in progress )
conceptual performance