|
|
|
|
 by name: by keyword: by place: |
|
Date: 9.11.96 "I have far too long
dragged a body around with me." Joseph Beuys Welcome to Bodies©
INCorporated (http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc). The building elements
at your disposal are ASCII text, simple geometric forms, TEXTures, and
low resolution sound. Bodies built become your personal property, operating
in and circulating through public space, free to be downloaded into your
private hard drive/communication system at any time. The MOO/WOO functions
as an institution through which your body gets shaped in the process of
identity construction that occurs in, and mutually implicates, both the
symbolic and material realms. [...] --------- The figure, that
semblance of the human body is a mode of representation that endures throughout
the history of art. After all, personal existence has its locus in one's
own body, even as one's disembodied consciousness is voluntarily aimed
at that which is not your body. In Bodies© INCorporated the body as focus
remains evident even in the digital realm, where the repression of the
meat-body takes a more liberated turn, an apparent valorization of Plato's
intellect and accompanying devaluation of the palpable. As the locus of one's
being, embodiedness is central to art as an object of representation.
In the Bodies© INCorporated project, embodiedness of the digit-body is
the locus which mediates between the sensible apprehension of particulars
and the intellectualization of universal conditions. The digit-body is
a motif--a trope--of the entirety of the self, and in its numericalization
of the body is the site of and metaphor for the disintegration of the
modern notion of the self. [...] The body in Bodies©
INCorporated then is a negative space denoting the body's former presence.
In this respect it reminds me of the epistemology of Baroque emblem book
images from the seventeenth century where the representations personify
aspects of the era in which they are rendered. Also evoked is the absence
which appears in the negative hand prints in the grottos of the European
Paleolithic. Given this reference to the absent body near the beginning
of art, its digital appearance now is unexceptional. It would be unexceptional
if the flesh in art is regarded simply as figurative in dialectic with
nonfigurative concepts. But in Bodies© INCorporated the anthropomorphic
figure serves, as in Postmodernism, a troubadour of decadence relative
to modernist formalist nonfiguration, where figurative art is eclipsed
by reductivist purism. In Bodies© INCorporated the figure endures, to
be sure, but not as an avant-garde motif. The body is no longer the locus
of the trope of progress. Just the opposite. [...] --------- Bodies© INCorporated,
a collaborative project conceptualized and produced by Victoria Vesna,
is a public space on the web that occasionally emerges in the physical
realm. It was exhibited from July 8 to August 11 at two network-linked
sites -- The Contemporary Art Center (for a show entitled "The Bridge"),
and The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center (for SIGGRAPH 96), both in
New Orleans. Currently, this work is on exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum
of Art (until November 3rd). To participate in
the Bodies© INCorporated project, the user is invited to construct a virtual
body out of predefined body-parts, textures, and sounds, and gain membership
to the larger body-owner community. The main elements of the online site
are three constructed environments (subsidiaries of Bodies© INCorporated),
within which different sets of activities occur: "LIMBO INCorporated,"
a gray, rather nondescript zone, where information about inert bodies
that have been put on hold--bodies whose owners have abandoned or neglected
them--is accessed; "NECROPOLIS INCorporated," a richly textured, baroque
atmosphere, where owners can either look at or choose how they wish their
bodies to die; and "SHOWPLACE!!! INCorporated," where members can participate
in discussion forums, view star/featured bodies of the week, bet in the
deadpools, and enter "dead" or "alive" chat sessions.
|