Reading Response 4

In this written piece, Bodies and Technology, one of the authors detail the transformations of thoughts surrounding bodies as we have progressed through time. Essentially beginning with the shift from the body as "off-limits" to being very much outside of others. The body became inauthentic and unrelatable to the everyday viewer. Similarly to the way art has a tendency to de-visceralize trauma, it has the tendency to dehumanize the body. An image of a woman becomes an image of a figure which simply becomes shapes to the viewer, and this was expedited by photography's emergence as a medium. To take a photograph of someone is to represent them in the most abstract way possible. Because that photograph is just one moment in time, the person is stripped from all humanistic qualities. Gone is personality, mannerisms, movement. This becomes an object to be observed, and therefore this distance is created between humans by technology. Another author continues the conversation into the ways technology brings a specific tie to art, referencing Cornelia Parker's use of Marie Antoinette's guillotine to slice through everyday household objects. That action brought a historical tie to these objects and connected things that would never be connected to Antoinette in another way, providing to them a connection through shared fate. This forces the viewer to think about Antoinette as someone to be felt rather than just seen, flipping the "otherness" of art onto its head. The piece then goes on to discuss the realities of bodies being represented in modern technology, specifically Latinx bodies on the internet. As an example, the author presents Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez as public figures for the Latinx population. But how effective of representation are they? While it is agreed to be progress toward representation of all populations of the world in the media, they represent just one small aspect of the Latinx. Each race in representation seems to have a certain specific, approachable stereotype which has been proven to be digestible by the public. This representation excludes the multitude of other shades of Latinx and the realities of being every day, working-class members of society. Overall, the piece discusses the tough separation technology creates between our own bodies and everybody else's, and as time has shifted this separation has shifted too.