what is Implicit Art?

Implicit Art, or as I more often call it, Implicit Body Art, is art that asks us to move in ways we normally wouldn’t, pushing the boundaries of performativity and affect. A different mode of thinking about interactive art – whether for critique or production or both – the Implicit Manifesto does not look to measure simulation or immersion, but instead explores stimulation and relationality.

Artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, David Rokeby, Char Davies, Scott Snibbe and myself have long been interested in embodiment as engaged (perhaps even initiated) through activity. For my PhD research, I’ve begun coupling our work, and that of similar artists, with the art of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and the research of Performance Studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Phillip Zarrilli. The results are simple-but-awkward interfaces that ask us to chase and stutter with our arms, smell and breathe with our legs, or see and hear with our hands. Always performative, usually interactive, and mostly digital, Implicit Art asks us to accent, and examine, the feedback loop that is embodiment. It looks at couplings between flesh and world through the lens of clumsy maneuverings.

enter:hektor, by nathaniel sternBelow is a recent abstract (full presentation and info further down the post) based on my dissertation research. More Implicit Art readings and writings will be forthcoming over the next 10 months…
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The Implicit Body as Performance

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), and examine 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: the implicit body.

This paper 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” continuous, 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 the boundaries 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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A PDF version of the academic presentation: The Implicit Body as Performance

Versions of this presentation have been given at Perspectives on the Body and Embodiment at the University College of Dublin and the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK; I also presented some of its initial ideas at the Ars Virtua ‘Body in Quotes’ panel in Second Life.