implicit art

I’m presenting a bit from my dissertation (some writing and works from chapters 1, 2 and mostly 4 – not that it’s done) at this conference at the University College of Dublin in a few weeks. If last year’s graduate student conference on philosophy and embodiment was any indication, this year’s should be grand.

UCD Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity Conference
Quinn School of Business
June 6-7, 2008

This conference will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on the theme of the body and society. The renowned academic Professor Gail Weiss from George Washington University will present a paper entitled “Intertwined Identities: The Challenges to Bodily Autonomy”. Professor Stephen Mennell has written extensively on the work of Norbert Elias and will give a paper entitled “Against Dualism: Bodies in Light of Norbert Elias’ Post-Philosophical Sociology”. In addition to these keynote speakers we have sixteen confirmed international and Irish speakers who will present on a diverse range of topics. Panels include Embodied Ethics, Gender and Feminism, Body Politics, Embodied Aesthetics, and Embodied Relations.

Full programme and registration details are available online at www.ucd.ie/philosophy/iiconference

My own abstract below the fold.

Social-Anatomies: intercorporeality in interactive art

This paper follows on “Implicit bodies through Explicit action,” a presentation I gave to last year’s UCD graduate conference, on interactive art and embodiment. My argument was that explorational and performative works created with new technologies are in a privileged position to engage with, and interrogate, some of the new areas of discourse surrounding embodiment and emergence. I aimed to show how “interactive artists-as-directors create productive tensions between the per-formed and the pre-formed, shifting our experiences of ‘body’,” and to highlight “potential strategies for intervention in our understandings of enfleshment, art that contextualizes embodiment towards specific ends.”

The “specific ends” alluded to in said paper are the focus of my more recent research. Here, I look at tighter thematics within the broader field of interactive art to show how co-emergent and relational categories – examples being flesh-space, body-language or social-anatomies – might affect one another as they come into being. Each is implicitly entwined and incipient – none exists without the other – but we can accent and examine how we interact, with what, why and to what end.

In this paper I first look to Jean-Luc Nancy’s renderings of people and community to set up co-emergent, relational categories more generally. I then turn to Nick Crossley’s readings of body techniques and intercorporeality (Marcel Maus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, respectively) to concentrate on the thematic I am calling social-anatomies. These are art works that attend, and intervene in, how bodies per-form – are dispersed, enacted, entwined, interfered, differentiated, shared and continuously embodied – with each other. These pieces work to un- and enfold precisely ‘bodies,’ all engaged across a sea of flesh. Elements from the social and the affective body are accented together, to make explicit the implicit, and versa vice. Finally, I will use several case studies to illustrate work that exemplifies, or rather embodies, social-anatomies.