Surface

The project deals with the specific modality of the relationship between the body and the digital at the intersection of technology and epistemology. If we understand the digital as a plane of recording that hides nothing beneath itself, but rather offers itself to be read by either machine or human, then we can, on the basis of this characteristic, recognise the similarity between the digital and the role occupied by the body in the history of science. The relationship between surface and depth mainly concerns the concourse of body and apparatus, recording and interpretative work. In this sense the production of diagnostic apparatuses is not an extension of analytic reason, but rather analytic reason is “apparatic” throughout and only realises its operations in the mechanical apparatus. Now we can better apprehend the relationship between the body and the digital, since the body, as an object of science, is historically constituted as a specific relationship between the recorded and its reading – the surfaces of signs and depth, the latter as the result of interpretative work or extraction. But the body is not a universal form, it is not the body as such, therefore, in relation to the body, the presented proto-concepts do not represent universal categories of the bodily. We must speak of surfaces and depths of the body as they appear in relation to altogether concrete and specific forms of interpretation and extraction: medical diagnostics, techniques of control and surveillance and, ultimately, computer graphics with its mimetic ambitions. The project makes use of the latter and tries, through two attempts, to present these relations, which in the first attempt interweave between the human body and the computer program by replicating the visual characteristics of skin (subsurface scattering), and in the second attempt between the movement of the “body” (Camera body) and the software analysis of spatial movement (camera tracking).