Academic inquiry and writing are an essential part of my practice. At present, I’m doing a research- and arts creation-based PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, which investigates The Implicit Body concept, summarized below. Beyond its introduction and an exploration of the existing critical theories and arts trajectories that support it, my focus is on new production and critiquing models for interactive body art and other work that comes out of interactivity discourses.
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The Implicit Body as Performance (abstract)
Brian Massumi, in his ‘Parables for the Virtual,’ asks us to put “movement, sensation, and qualities of experience” back into our understandings of embodiment without “contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory.” Mark Hansen’s ‘body-in-code’ echoes this call, reading the sensorimotor body as an “activity” and a “being-with,” which is “distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.” They want to explore “a semiotics willing to engage with continuity” (Massumi), to scrutinize our agency in the “scope of body-environment coupling” (Hansen). As a producing artist, my parallel question is, “How might the body’s continuity, and its potential disruption, be attendant, provoked and contextualized in contemporary art?”
My research contends that the body is performed. A body in space can “act” as a site of emergence, a boundary project, and an incipience. While Rebecca Schneider’s “explicit body” in feminist performance art performatively unfolds (Latin: explicare) and explicates, the implicit body concordantly enfolds (Latin: implicare) and implies. Inter-action is both constitutive of, and always already involved in, the flesh. Like an animated moebius strip, the body feeds back between affection and reflection.
This dissertation attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. Interactive art has the power to “put in quotes” relational bodies and their immediate environments; it accents our dispersion and interference across borders, putting into crisis both our conscious and non-conscious perceptions and actions. I’m interested in work or environments that ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing into the realms of performativity and affect. By setting the stage, interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of “body”. At stake, are potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends.
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See my CV for various Implicit Body publications, or download a recent, short academic presentation/paper from implicitbody.net
