Continuous Bodies
Nathaniel Stern's Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance operates like a museum in a book. So numerous and carefully juxtaposed are artworks within a network of subtly argued ideas, the reader cannot help but feel stimulated to imagine and temporarily live with the works he describes. This presence of the works that I'm highlighting is hardly surprising. Stern wishes to show how 'matter matters, however mediated' [1], and this aspiration manifests in the palpability to which his analyses give rise. The centrality of matter in interactive art, Stern argues, stems partially but importantly from the need he perceives to elaborate upon poststructuralist and later critical attitudes concerning the body's irreducibly linguistic constitution.[2]
Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3] Whereas the former posits static bodies, implicit body art (notably staged in interactive art) presents continuous bodies in a perpetual state of emergence. We humans are surely encoded by society, but body art has much more to say than this. Interactive art provides a stage or 'rig' which creates the conditions to suspend, amplify or intervene upon its audiences' conventional notions and experiences of embodiment and 'bodiliness'.
While Stern is concerned primarily with new media artworks, namely pieces which are somehow perceptibly changed through their viewers' direct or indirect interactions with them, the theoretical landscape he sketches and his ensuing theorisations offer a productive way to reflect upon earlier, analogue forms of media art. His notion of the potentialised artwork, for instance, crosses over with my recent thinking about 1980s Chilean video art.
[1] Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2013), p. 207.
[2] Over the course of his research, Stern entered productive dialogue with N. K. Hayles's How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and K. Barad's 'Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter', in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8(3), (2003), 801–30.
[3] Stern, p. 75.
Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3] Whereas the former posits static bodies, implicit body art (notably staged in interactive art) presents continuous bodies in a perpetual state of emergence. We humans are surely encoded by society, but body art has much more to say than this. Interactive art provides a stage or 'rig' which creates the conditions to suspend, amplify or intervene upon its audiences' conventional notions and experiences of embodiment and 'bodiliness'.
While Stern is concerned primarily with new media artworks, namely pieces which are somehow perceptibly changed through their viewers' direct or indirect interactions with them, the theoretical landscape he sketches and his ensuing theorisations offer a productive way to reflect upon earlier, analogue forms of media art. His notion of the potentialised artwork, for instance, crosses over with my recent thinking about 1980s Chilean video art.
[1] Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2013), p. 207.
[2] Over the course of his research, Stern entered productive dialogue with N. K. Hayles's How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and K. Barad's 'Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter', in: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8(3), (2003), 801–30.
[3] Stern, p. 75.
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