updata

Howdy y’all.

Apologies for the lack of updates on this blog or my daughter’s site over the last few weeks. I realize now that I really only cut out a few hours per week (my online teaching), but added a full-time PhD post, a daughter, a new country to learn, and (the usual) a few new writing and art projects. The blog has (and will likely continue to) suffered a bit. Also expect more on the academic / philosophy art-geek side, and less on the techy and local stuff… But, a few things to report nonetheless.

• I’m in Joburg in 10 days! I’ll be coming in for my solo exhibition, Call and Response, at Art on Paper Gallery, in the 44 Stanley Avenue complex. It’s going to be opened by the gregarious Professor Jane Taylor; click the link to preview the beautiful catalogue Ellen designed, with texts by Clive Kellner (Johannesburg Art Gallery) & Wilhelm van Rensburg (University of Johannesburg), edited by Nicole Ridgway (Best Wife Ever). Also just put up a slideshow of all the prints there… Please try to make it, 27 January, 3PM (map).
• And in the spirit of updating my online stuff, I’ve added a few things to the main site, like new descriptions (and a new page) of older performances – I never wrote statements for those collaborations, so wound up finding some text online. There’ll be a few more updates in the coming days.
• But more in line with printmaking, I can confirm I’ll be working with printer and artist Zhane Warren on my three week residency at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium this July. Very excited to work with her, as well as keep up the SA link.
• Last and most of all, if there’s one important thing I’ve done towards my PhD over the last couple of months, it’s solidify my research goals. Woo woo. Below is a 300-word abstract proposal I wrote for a potential upcoming conference. Multiply it by dissertation-length (by adding several sections on methodologies and sub-concepts through case studies and my own arts production), and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the next 3 years of my life!

Without further ado,

In and Around: the Implicit Body as Performance
by li’l ole me

Theorists and producers of the “mixed reality” movement within interactive art argue that inviting action and enactment, rather than producing illusion and simulacrum, creates more immersive spaces. Mark Hansen’s concept of the “body-in-code,” for example, reads the sensorimotor body here as an “activity” and a “being-with,” where the body is “distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics.”

Others, such as Brenda Laurel and Chris Salter, have sought to re-think critical histories of digital practice in order to locate interactive and digital art more precisely in the theatrical or performance realms.

My research contends that in such spaces, it is the body, itself, which 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 space of the body as relational. Like an animated moebius strip, the body is: in and around.

This paper attempts to think through digital art as a proscenium for, and framer of, the implicit body. I’m not necessarily interested in work or environments that are more illusory or more immersive, but that, rather, ask us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. Like space itself, bodiliness is “susceptible to folding, division and reshaping… open to continual negotiation” (K Kirby). 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.