Lacanian Unconscious And New Media Aesthetics

Contemporary biotechnologies provide an entryway into thinking about bodies and organisms not as natural and biological entities but as informational media, technological apparatuses, instrumental mediums, symbolic systems and coded means of communication, replacing the theories and practices concerning mimetic imitation of life and mechanical reproduction of nature with the semiotic, linguistic, and bioinformatic reproduction of bodies and organisms. This article examines postbiological articulation of bodies, desires, and sexualities at the site of the convergence between Lacanian psychoanalysis and new media aesthetics. It is at the interstices of the connections between information and communication technologies, modern biology, and structural linguistics that Jacques Lacan locates his psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and desire. The notion of the unconscious as it is mapped by Lacan over structural linguistics’ intrinsic kinship with information and communication technologies enables him to examine desire and sexuality at the site of the convergence between linguistic-informational, biological, and psychoanalytic discourses. This bioinformatic revolution transforms the aesthetic stakes of everyday life by suggesting new ways of thinking about bodies, desires, and sexualities. By drawing on acoustic and visual remappings of the body, fragmented and hybrid bodies, digital desires and sexualities in new media artworks, I analyze the body in contemporary art as a biotechnological apparatus, symbolic system, and discursive and non-discursive mode of communication flowing among various media networks and systems.