re: Skin - Hardcover

Flanagan, Mary; Booth, Austin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262062607 ISBN 13: 9780262062602

Publisher: MIT Press, 2007

Synopsis

This book talks about skin as boundary and surface, metaphorically and physically: creative and critical perspectives on skin and bodily transformation as it intersects with digital technologies. In "Re: Skin", scholars, essayists and short story writers offer their perspectives on skin - as boundary and surface, as metaphor and physical reality. The twenty-first century and its attendant technology call for a new investigation of the intersection of body, skin, and technology. These cutting-edge writings address themes of skin and bodily transformation in an era in which we are able not only to modify our own skins - by plastic surgery, tatooing, skin graft art, and other methods - but to cross skins, merging with other bodies or colonizing multiple bodies. The book's agile crossings of disciplinary and genre boundaries enact the very transformations they discuss. A short story imagines a manufactured maternal interface that allows a man to become pregnant, and a scholar describes the evolution of "body criticism"; a writer uses "faux science" to explore animal prints on faux fur, and fictional lovers experience one another's sexual sensations through the slipping on and off of skin-like bodysuits. Ubiquitous computational interfaces are considered as the "skin" of technology, and questions of race and color are shown to play out in digital art practice. The essays and narratives gathered in "Re: Skin" claim that the new technologically mutable body is neither purely liberating nor simply limiting; instead, these pieces show us models, ways of living in a technological culture.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Flanagan is Associate Professor of Digital Art and Culture and Director of Tiltfactor Lab at Hunter College. Austin Booth is Director of Collections and Research Services at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262062607
• ISBN 13: 9780262062602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336