sentientBody 1998

one computer-assisted interactive video projection, one video projection, stainless steel container, pumping system, water, wireless audio, overall dimensions variable.

In sentientBody, the viewer experiences a real time interactive site that relates to lived experience—an organic space that is altered by technology.  My intent is to explore the shifts in the stability of our own increasingly technologized bodies by pointing to the body as a transformative site constantly in the process of becoming.  

On one wall of the gallery, a large video projection contains images of waves scraping across sand and across intimate enlargements of the body.  I have developed imagery in which the motion of waves dragging over sand or over our bodies becomes indistinguishable to suggest bodily mutability over time.

In the middle of the gallery, a stainless steel container is filled with slowly circulating water.  When the viewer walks toward the container, an image of their moving body is projected downward into the water.  First projected in real time, the image is then captured and projected several more times.  Each time the image is projected it deteriorates and fades until it disappears.  The water also decays over time.

Emerging from the stainless steel container is the real time sound of a pump and motor, calibrated to pump the water at the same rate as we breathe.  The 'breathing' water moving through the stainless steel container suggests internal liquids moving through the body, the fluids from which we’ve developed, as well as a technological life support system. 

This work asks questions about how we have evolved as humans, how we define what is human, what is life and what is death, while pondering how malleable the body has become with ever increasing medical interventions

Credits:

Dave Sandeman: Electronics

Ernest Mayer, Photographer