Abstract:
As a practitioner invested in the relationship between bodies and technologies, I often come up against the problem of how digital and technology-based art can sit comfortably in a contemporary art context. This essay has been written with a focus on how digital practices can be re-conceived or re-contextualised in ways that are useful to my own practice and wider discourse. My conceptual interests rely on how everyday life and the body are inextricably linked through an individually lived experience and how the body performs itself whilst being performed on (by other subjects, by things and by systems of subjects and things). It seems to me that bodily matters and embodied relations are making the body a significant object of reflection. The current trend toward forms of socially engaged art practices that favour the surrounding discussion to essentialise cultural and social identity seems to do little to acknowledge the issues around the life of ‘things’ in the social world and; more specifically, what happens to things when they are transported into the context of socially engaged art practices. It is fortunate that, due to our corporeal embodiment, there is still some space to move against the prescriptions culture imposes on identity and the limits it imposes on autonomy. By referring to the Bill Brown’s notions on Things Theory, Carrie Nolan’s work on embodied gesture, and Vilém Flusser’s epistemological mirrors, I will sketch out an argument that calls for the adoption of a phenomenological approach to gain insight on the social significance of bodily experience and subjectivity that is inseparable from our relationship to objects.
