Marina Grzinic
«Dragan Zivadinov’s «Biomechanics Noordung»»

Marina Grzinic
«Dragan Zivadinov’s ‹Biomechanics Noordung›»

In the following text the question of the body in relation to cyberspace and new media technology will be discussed through a project that was realized within the contemporary theater/performance production in Slovenia.

The reasons are two:

1. «Biomechanics Noordung» is to be seen the first pioneering project of such a sort in the world. The American businessmen Tito who took a similar, though touristic flight, did because of money abundance and excessive free time, therefore because of pure pleasure. In the case of «Biomechanics Noordung» it is a result of two decades of history of theater and performance in Slovenia, and several decades of theater and scientific research in Russia, therefore grounded in desire and practices of re-invention of the body and technology.

2. Though being specific to the territory of the East of Europe it enfaces very important and productive differences on one side, and connections on the other with contemporary theory of cyberspace, the time-space paradigm and the question of the body in time of virtual technology.
In 1995 the theatre director Dragan Zivadinov (from Ljubljana, Slovenia) explained one of his theatre works, conceived as an almost imaginary trajectory to be displayed in the future.

On April 20, 1995 Zivadinov has announced that his cosmists action «One Against Ten Million, One Against One, Noordung» (premiered on April 20, 1995 at 22.00) will get its first reprise precisely in ten years, on the same day, at the same time, with the same actors, same costumes and with the same text. The second reprise, Zivadinov explained, will take place in 2015. The third reprise will take place in 2025, the fourth in 2035 and the last, the fifth, in 2045.

Everything is to be the same except in the case if someone dies. Should one of the actors die between the intervals of the repetitions, he or she will be substituted, replaced by a remote-controlled robot-model. According to the mise-en-scène, there, where the live actor performed his task, communicating verbally with his co-actors, a symbol will be placed. Verbal parts of the deceased actresses will be substituted by a melody within the same timing. Verbal parts of the deceased actors will be substituted by a rhythm. The live actors will act as if the deceased one were present. In 2045, there will be sixteen models and music scores instead of the actors within the performance space—inhabited sculpture.

«On May 1, 2045, I will fly into the geostatic orbit by a spacecraft and place them on sixteen points around the Earth, as close as possible to the information satellites». (Zivadinov 1960-2045)

In 1995, when Zivadinov explained his future theatrical concept, it sounded like a myth that will slowly become a reality. On December 15 1999, Dragan Zivadinov’s Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung Theatre performed «Biomechanics Noordung» in a Russian IL-76MDK cosmonaut training aircraft, registered RA 78770, at an altitude of 6.600 meters. The aircraft was operated from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, based in Star City, just outside Moscow.

Dragan Zivadinov’s Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung Theatre performed its «Biomechanics Noordung» at zero gravity. The performance by Zivadinov involved actors that for 1 minute performed in zero gravity. The public was not included, but the performance was filmed. The actors worn special costumes re-designed from the time of Meyerhold theater research, and the internal space of the aircraft was re-arrange into a theater space, decorated with objects from the Russian constructivist art period, which flourished immediately after the October socialist revolution, around 1920. The «Biomechanics Noordung» performance consisted of a repetition of choreographed Biomechanics movements.

Zivadinov’s «Biomechanics Noordung» analyses contemporary theatre and performance phenomena through—in relation to or in spite of—the plethora of new technological and electronic means. The investigation is developed through an intersection of theatre, the body, mobility, subjectivity and mechanics, with more general social phenomena and their realities, and especially with contemporary theories of the physiological changes of the human skeleton at zero gravity. This later connection has to be viewed in relation to possible (scientifically confirmed) changes in bones structure, that affect people, who spend a longer period in zero gravity.

Zivadinov inspects the kinetic conceptualizations of new technologies and elaborates on issues of simulation, simulacrum and the cyborgs/cybernetics/cybernauts. The contemporary time-and-space paradigm takes on a central role in his Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung Theatre, as does the problem of the ‹subject› as an actor and performer in the electronic era. With Zivadinov, the actor has become a terminal, a final location of numerous networks, placed within a global structure of data-webs, into the current world of cybernetic space. The relation of zero gravity and cyberspace is a tropological and topological one. What this means? Cyberspace is space where physical space has the value zero. Through Internet on the other side, it is possible to reach every space—what counts it is just time. Zero gravity is the most total and implosive situation of the paradigm of space in cyberspace. It implies a zero dimension of space and it is a final, terminal, condition of a total extrapolation of space.

In his seminal book, «Terminal Identity», Scott Bukatman defines terminal culture or cyberspace as the era in which the digital or tactical has substituted the tactile. He further argues (using Jean Baudrillard’s terms) that physical action in terminal situations—and what else is the zero gravity situation?—returns as a strategy of communication, combining tactile with tactical simulation (Baudrillard). The visual and rhetorical recognition of terminal space therefore prepares the subject for a more direct, bodily engagement (Bukatman). The only real engagement is trough his/her body that is the only possible space that res(is)ts when we are in cyberspace.

Lets think more precisely about virtual reality space? It is a space that convulses the body at a point of vomiting. In virtual space we have a feeling, we will vomit. It is the most internal body swallowing of any space exteriority. The result is a convulsion and the process of trying to empty the stomach, while the brains are completely immersed into or sucked by the virtual space. This is the most direct engagement of the body into space, it is a position of the body similar to a reversed glove.

Moreover, cyberspace is grounded upon, or concentrates on, the cybernaut. Timothy Leary reminds us that: «The word cybernetic-person, or cybernaut, returns us to the original meaning of ‹pilot› and puts the self-reliant person back in the loop.» The construction of a new cyberspatial subject thus relies upon a narration of perception followed by kinesis (Bukatman), piloting, mobile distancing, traveling and gravitation. This is exactly the recapitulation of the position of the actor generated by Zivadinov’s process of physiognomic reconstitution at zero gravity. The actors here are astronauts, they perform while traveling trough the zero gravity space. Similarly to Zivadinov, or vice versa, in order to constitute electronic space as a paradigm or a matrix that is susceptible to an act of comprehension, writers such as Jean Baudrillard or William Gibson, also rely on metaphors and actions of human perception based on mobility.

Noordung Biomechanics refers to a process that combines life with mechanics. Biomechanics is about motion and the action of forces on bodies. The primary domain of Biomechanics is physiology, i.e., the science of dealing with the functions and vital processes of living organisms and mechanical movements. Biomechanics, as first researched by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), is today used widely in military medicine. Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (1874–1942), with his ideas of the Revolutionary theatre, in which the theatre is perceived as a mobile space with constructivist elements, introduced biomechanical elements into the theatre as agents of dramatically performed actions. Zivadinov takes precisely these points from Meyerhold research and transpose them in his theater research.

It is also important to emphasis that the word Biomechanics cannot be found in the Webster’s New World dictionary, but is strongly present in the Russian tradition from theatre to physiology. In this context, I can state that what is for the developed ‹West› associated with genetic engineering was in Russia connected with Biomechanics. For both sciences are into changes of the body in relation to technology. Biomechanics is a research of movement, kinesis and body transformations that are changing also with technology. Meyerhold's research into Biomechanics Theater was in connection with the actor as an acrobat, but later this relation changed. The dwelling of the body in zero gravity (also perceived as a type of Biomechanics) shows that the changes effectuated on the body, are deeply internal. Today is known that dwelling for a long period of time in zero gravity, at least for one year, results in an inner change of human bones and skeleton. This is why Biomechanics within zero gravity can be seen as a fundamental process for radical changes of humans’ structures.

Zivadinov differentiates three stages in Biomechanics, with respective technological gadgets, political references and body parts:

1. Historical Biomechanics (until the beginning of World War II)
2. Tele-presence Biomechanics (which began with World War II and, I will add, is connected with an increasing expansion of research in rocket technology and astronautics)
3. Cosmic Biomechanics (inaugurated by Zivadinov’s Noordung Biomechanics).

These levels of suggested historical changes are important because [they] connect Biomechanics to other levels of differentials, which I call structural differentiations between, optical, electronics and computer-digital levels of technological influence onto the body, memory and action.

Historical Biomechanics can be seen as the period of optical technologies where radio is the most important medium, and the body of an actor, participating in historical biomechanical performance, is the body of an acrobat. In Tele-presence Biomechanics, television has become the central apparatus, and it is thus not difficult to see the connection with our own era of electronic technologies and images. The actor in Tele-presence changes from an acrobat into an experimental body. Computer, i.e., for Zivadinov, the «intelligent television,» is the path to the third stage. Cosmic Biomechanics implies the politics of the digital machine; this is a path from talking-head linear TV to a 3D living form at zero space gravity. Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung Theatre is all about the science of motion and the action of forces on bodies. The project is about different bodies in parallel worlds: physical bodies, sexual bodies, social bodies, media bodies and political bodies. Each territory produces a border body. In Cosmic Biomechanics, the change is from muscles to skeleton. Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev who spent more than a year in the zero gravity ambience (1 year, 5 months and 10 days), showed this clearly. He experienced, according to Zivadinov, changes in his bones and skeletal structure.

Possible other examples of these historical changes within body, memory and action are (precisely in the following order): Cindy Sherman (New York), Dumb Type (Kyoto), Orlan (Canada) and Stelarc (Australia). In the case of Cindy Sherman, the body is a screen, used for all sorts of changes, for the complete masquerade of identity. Cindy Sherman copies and reconstructs images from films (stereotypical images of women) and impersonates them as iconic photographs. She uses her body as a screen for projection and transformation, but still all stays on the superficial level, nothing changes inside; all is just re-played in front of the photographic camera, using styling and make-up techniques. A much more radical step were played by the actors from the Japanese performance group Dumb Type. The leading actor and director of the group was HIV positive when he established the group. That means that the Dumb Type actor was not a theatre character (as in the case of Cindy Sherman), but a life character. The leading actor in Dumb Type was an Aids bomb, he himself was the reservoir of the virus—he was the virus—and the potential form of illness. While HIV positive he continually reminded us of his virus potentiality that waited to become a reality. Orlan performs operations on her body, as it is in the case with beauty corrections. Orlan uses surgical operations as performances onto her body. All is filmed and presented with ‹bloody› details in front of the public. Orlan is a regression, a pre-final form of a cyborg. Orlan is a modern Frankenstein that reconsiders cosmetology much more seriously than cosmology. A more advanced step is Stelarc, who technologically transformed/upgraded/ enhanced his body. Stelarc is not just a (superficial) actor, nor a life agent (as the Dumb type character), but a transformative agent, a body transformed deeply with technology. He is the potential cyborg (muscles manipulated through the Internet).

In «Cosmic Biomechanics» the actors are vectors.

The concept of the body that I am interested in mapping into cyberspace subjectivity is not simply another representational imperative driven by the collapsing of the body into the hyperreal domain of simulation. It is a concept of negotiation between different registers: the natural world, projected subjectivity and human/machine links, etc. Such a concept of the body in cyberspace, re-read through Merlau-Ponty’s philosophy, returns the body back to the Freudian epistemology of the «body that thinks» (David-Menard). The body that thinks is not only against any mind/body dualism, but insists on a mysterious corporeal and representational dynamic beyond the limits of any single theory.

As Zivadinov argues, at zero gravity Biomechanics, it is not any longer just a question of psychodynamics’, but of space vectors. In zero gravity ambience in general, and in «Biomechanics Noordung» potentiality, the body carries the possibility of inner transformation. Bodies as vectors. Vectors are carriers. Mass, speed and acceleration are typical vector dimensions characterized by orientation, path and sum. The body starts to function as a vector at zero gravity: the body gains the absolute sum of intensity. The transformation of the actor's skeleton is potentially the transformation of Biomechanics: inner bone substance can be used as food or fertilizer. This is why Zivadinov talks about Krikalev’s vector. Algorithms describe these changes. An algorithm is any special way of solving a certain kind of mathematical problem, just as LIFE is a very simple computer program. In the mid of the 1990s on the computer game market it was possible to buy a game that was displaying ‹life› as a simple mathematical problem. Therefore it is possible to say that ‹LIFE› is a special algorithm, connected to a series of computer extrapolations, implying again and again an absolute artificiality of life. This is not the disappearance of life, but the artificilization of its parameters.

Moreover, generally speaking, what is going on in zero gravity can be described in the following way: gravity pulls all bodies in the Earth’s sphere, toward the Earth’s center. In the zero gravity ambience, the force by which every mass attracts and is attracted by every other mass is 0. In such conditions are artificial satellites—objects artificially put into orbit around the Earth –, astronauts, and as well as all objects in a spacecraft. Bodies move away from the center of rotation, and therefore, Earth’s gravitation is abolished. The bodies in the spacecraft, from a drop of dust to a drop of water, are weightless. One might think about this problem in terms of urinating or about the fuel for the spacecraft. It is interesting that in 1966, it was commonly stated that researches on behaviors and living in zero gravity atmosphere had shown no physiological or biological effects upon the human body.

Real bodies invaded the zero gravity space presenting a vertiginous display of their very depthlessness. This depthlessness carries a political re-articulation of the space on the Earth. Relaying on time, having the possibilities to access any place on the earth through Internet for example, being constrained only by the speed of connections of our modems, gives a fake sense that every space is at our hand. Certain places and territories can therefore disappear easily. It is possible to understand «Noordung Biomechanics» as the re-articulation of this situation. In short, if certain spaces are becoming ‹zero,› are erased from our visibility, as Eastern Europe with its specific history for example, then to make visible this zero historical position is possible only in zero gravity, out of the World.

In «Noordung Biomechanics» both the theatre and performance meet the Real. If we think about the theatre as symbolic space (where the actor represents) and about performance as the process connected with reality (where the actor articulates his or her own non-mediated reality), then the «Noordung Biomechanics’» actor transformed in an astronaut is the traumatic Real of the theatre and performance. One should bear in mind that the Real, the indivisible remainder that resists its reflective idealization, is not «a kind of external kernel which idealization, symbolization is unable to swallow, to internalize, but the irrationality, so to speak the madness of the very founding gesture of idealization/symbolization.»

In the end there is a fiction.


This essay was published in the following periodicals or books:

Marina Grzinic, «Dragan Zivadinov's Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet Theatre,» in Frakcija, 2000, 1, 1, pp. 58–62.

Marina Grzinic, «Biomehanika Noordung, » in Maska (Ljubl.), spring 2000, 9, 1-2 (60-61), pp. 19–22.

Marina Grzinic, Fiction reconstructed : Eastern Europe, post-socialism & the retro-avant-garde, Vienna, 2000.

Marina Grzinic, «Dragan Zivadinov's Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet Theatre and Emil Hrvatin's Cabinet of Memories = Dragan Zivadinov Noordung Kozmokinetikus Kamraszínháza és Emil Hrvatkin Emlékezetszobája,» in: Nina Czegledy (ed.), Digitized bodies – virtual spectacles. Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art: = Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs Múvészeti Múzeum, 2001, pp.71–85.

Marina Grzinic, «Aesthetics of the digitized body,» in Kiyokazu Nishimura (ed.), Selected papers of the 15th International Congress of Aesthetics, 2003, pp.81–86.

Marina Grzinic, «Neue Slowenische Kunst,» in: Misko Suvakovic and Dubravka Djuric (eds.), Impossible histories : historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, and post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991. Cambridge; London, 2003, pp.122–269.

Marina Grzinic, The Esthetics of Cyberspace and the Effects of De-realization, (Prizma), Ljubljana, 2003.

Marina Grzinic, «Dragan Zivadinov’s Biomechanics», exhib. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, 2004.