I Sing the Body Electric
MFRU32: I Sing the Body Electric focuses on the diverse positions of the human body in the present and the speculative future of digital development. The festival’s title is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman. Through numerous sections, the poet examines various aspects of physicality, gender, age, politics, society … everything that defines the embodied human being. Establishing the body as the dwelling place of the soul, he advocates for the radical (equal) worth of every individual. Provided that the soul exists within the body, it now also resides within the technological spaces we have constructed both practically and ideologically, and is transformed accordingly. In the digital age (both through generated images and physical modifications), the body is moving ever higher up the ladder of simulacra, increasingly distancing itself from its biological basis and creating its own adapted appearance and mode of existence. This year’s festival explores the body – or biological mass – in relation to digital technologies at the intersection of economic, political and sociological factors. At the forefront of artistic interest, the body is addressed from a posthumanist perspective, which takes a critical stance towards the humanist ideal of “man” as the measure of all things, opposing the hierarchy of species and human exceptionalism. Posthumanism opposes the hierarchy of species and human exceptionalism, and argues that the body and technology are in a reciprocal relationship. The body is interpolated into the digital age as a data carrier and an element of the (inter)net.
In his “mirror stage” concept, Jacques Lacan argued that one's self-awareness arises through identification with the image they see (recognising oneself in the mirror). Humans are said to recognise our image as stable and coherent, even when our experience of being in the body fluctuates and changes. Lacan defined several bodies: the imaginary body – the perception of one’s own image, the symbolic body – the body that bears ascribed categories and names, and the real body – the body that feels. Changes in technological development relate to the extension of the mirror stage and the imaginary body. Existence in the digital age (a world of social media, avatars, and curated and manipulated images of ourselves) partially disembodies us, or rather allows our image to freely adapt to digital spaces, where it can be altered and renamed at will. While it loses stability and coherence, the image gains autonomy and the potential for subversiveness. Through pixels and algorithms, we can create new identities, perceive ourselves through the lens of digital spaces and situate ourselves within an infinity of possible categories.
Merleau-Ponty argued that various tools can be integrated into the structure of our physical body. With the aid of devices, we now speak, think, express love and pay attention. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway reflected on technology as an internal, rather than an external, factor in our existence. Using cyborgs (hybrids of machine and organism) as an example, she challenged the formerly clear boundaries between human and machine, and the physical and the digital. Thereby, she called into question the essentialism of fixed identity associated with our notion of the natural as something immutable and hierarchically inviolable. Deleuze defines humans, animals, institutions… as “desiring machines”: the desire for production lies at the heart of human ontology, pushing us into rigidly defined functions and tasks. By renouncing these prescribed functions, we become a “body without organs”, i.e. a person who finds different ways of thinking, expressing oneself and forming relationships. When we think of ourselves as a combination of the characteristics of a biological entity and those of machines, we might recall Katherine Hayes. In How We Became Posthuman, she pointed out that there is no artificial substitute for human consciousness, and that human experience remains rooted within the body as the origin of all information.
When exploring the body as an artistic theme in the digital age, it is essential to look back at reflections on the body’s position throughout history and its development. In the post-internet era, when we no longer perceive the internet as something new but as an omnipresent part of everyday life that is completely intertwined with our physical lives, we must perceive our existence as changing in relation to the physical, biological reality that exists, reflected and transformed by us, also in the online, electronic, programmed, technological and scientific realms. We disembody and re-embody ourselves in an intangible, fantastical and boundless space that constantly co-defines our physical reality, every thought and action generated by our bodies.
In the project Hi-Res Prints for Burial T-shirts, Ema Maznik Antić and Maks Bricelj treat space and existence as something we encounter through models, simulations and imaginaries circulating within media systems. The interior and exterior no longer function as direct experiences of space, but increasingly as rendered and simulated states. While the project also draws on the logic of vector space, the installation presented by the artists is a wood shack, an interstitial space into which the human body enters via projections of imaginaries composed of occult symbols, sigils, survivalist aesthetics and synthetic representations of the wilderness.
With Lestes, Marco Donnarumma invites the audience to slow down and surrender to the messy feeling of intimately sensing another body: an experience of intercorporeal vulnerability. The organs leverage biomechanical aspects of human anatomy to transmit sound through the viscera, rather than the ears. Their form – tentacular, bone-like and cyber-organic – conjures up an ancient otherworldly body part, a symbol of a yet-unimagined form of embodiment. As a visitor picks up an organ and holds it against their bodies, this envelops their chest and neck by means of tentacles that spread onto embedded acoustic transducers. The organ’s contact with the body blurs the line between symbiosis and parasitism.
The video Open Source Estrogen by the artist Mary Maggic begins with a speculative question: What if it was possible to produce estrogen in the kitchen? This starting point gives rise to questions and a biohacking approach regarding who produces hormones, whose bodies are affected and how environmental hormones already exist as a state of toxicity. Among the key themes relating to bodily and gender sovereignty is the issue of endocrine disruptors, known as ‘xenoestrogens’, which permeate our environment as a result of the activities of petrochemical, agro-industrial and pharmaceutical forces. Xenomolecules alter the morphology of our bodies and bodies of non-human species, evidencing a malleability inherent to nature but alien to our prescribed notions of (eco)heteronormativity.
Blaž Miklavčič’s Grids is the result of thinking about networks and the uneasy relationship arising between its internal elements. Grids function as emergent phantasms. Because their logics are entirely composed of their individual elements, it becomes considerably harder to determine both their boundaries and the site of their emergence. In this relationship, softness and rigidity are equally responsible for fragile homeostasis of the system. Guiding and guidedness oscillate between states of symbiosis and parasitism. The work aesthetically adopts a biological form, thereby situating the body within a system of networks, whilst at the same time being itself composed of a networked system. The image evokes a view of the web as entrails, as an opportunity to divine the future from it based on the patterns observed, in accordance with the ancient practice of haruspicy.
Margherita Pevere’s W.O1 non/living installation from the Wombs series features organ-like scientific glassware hosting biofilm-producing bacterial colonies. Their culture medium is infused with hormone metabolites and residues extracted from the artist’s urine by re-staging scientific methods. The fluids in our cells connect us to deep time waters. This leaky materiality entwines our everyday choices with a multitude of other bodies: living and non-living, human and more-than-human. Building on this, the project Wombs explores how the progestine-based contraceptive taken by the artist can connect her body to other, more-than-human bodies. In doing so, it draws on vulnerability and toxic embodiment, whilst encouraging a critical rethinking of the discourse on sexuality and contraception as exclusively human experiences.
Tilen Prelič and Tia Stefančič use the VoxDei 2.6 digital prayer booth to explore the “dead internet” theory as a satirical reflection of contemporary digital culture. The internet, once imagined as a space of open communication, now appears as an environment of algorithms, bots and generated content, in which the human voice is gradually losing its influence. The installation does not treat the “death” of the internet as a final collapse, but rather as its fusion with everyday life and as a system we no longer use from the outside, but experience as part of our own identity. Framed as a digital religion, technology emerges as a new spiritual authority, a prayer booth we enter both with body and spirit.
In the video I Am Turning into a Faucet, Dunja Rahovsky Šuligoj gently references René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and subsequent phenomenological reflections on representations of reality that are not reality itself. The video-manipulated body parts and the faucet are distorted into elongated organic forms, exposing an unsettling carnality and eroticism of images processed in this way, as the image appears to be striving to escape its two-dimensionality. For a moment, the moving image reveals the dependence of algorithms on the human body, which is becoming increasingly intrusive in all forms of data collection and processing.
Lara Reichmann’s project Disposable Bodies is based on a group of anonymous women known as the Women Astronomical Computers, who, at the Harvard Observatory in the late 19th century, researched and mapped star systems using photographic glass plates. The installation equates their work with that of the anonymous human computer A.H.K., who generates diary entries and replaces the group of women, their work and their contribution. The personified computer transforms the capabilities of human intelligence and labour into a software system. With every calculation, it presents humanity as superfluous, even though its functioning is crucially dependent on the foundations laid by women’s labour.
In Chora, Gaia Radić explores virtual space as being entirely interdependent on the visitor. Upon the visitor’s arrival, a virtual world emerges which establishes a reciprocal relationship with the individual: the world’s existence depends on the viewer’s presence and perception, and what is seen takes shape according to the viewer’s capacity for perception and interpretation of physical responses. A heterotopic space is established, which Foucault defined as a real, non-utopian place that operates according to principles different from those of the rest of society, such as prisons, cemeteries and galleries, but also virtual spaces in which the human body exists in an altered state and constantly adapts to its environment.
Andrej Škufca developed the BESM360-Kitov for the Ultrastructures series, based on fragments of military and civilian infrastructure scattered across Eastern Europe. In the series, the artist explores how the human environment and human-made structures become autonomous. The superfluity of the body is revealed in the involuntary participation of the individual, who is gradually overwhelmed by the scale of networks and systems that begin to dictate their rhythm of life, actions and ideology. The body becomes alienated, subordinated to the autonomy of technology, once created as an extension of the human being. The locus of control shifts: creations intended to increase control over the environment begin to grow, think and take control of their creator. Without our consent, we constantly enter systems that operate beyond the scope of our understanding and control.
Tomaž Zajelšnik presents the vapor(wave) project. Based on classic analogue and digital photographic techniques, the series – in which the photographer observes and documents the properties of water in its extreme forms – has evolved into interactive multimedia photographic and computer installations. Through photographs of abstractly framed natural phenomena directly linked to water, inner feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and transience are reflected. Using his own software, microcomputers and connected sensors, as well as cameras that respond to human presence, the artist adds interactivity to the photographs, serving as a reflection of human impact on the natural environment in the age of climate change.
Sara Nuša Golob Grabner