veridicalBody 1998
two computer-interactive projections, video projection, stainless steel sensor device, two audio sources, two VCRs, relay box, interface box, overall dimensions variable
In veridicalBody, I am investigating the underlying promises of medical technologies. We live within vulnerable bodies - bodies that deal daily with trauma, disease, decay and death. What is a factual or truthful body given medical and other technological interventions? Has there every really been a factual body?
In the installation, the viewer’s actions point to the body as a transformative site constantly in the process of becoming. A situation is created in which medical interventions happen in a kind of partnership with the body. The actual body deteriorates over a longer duration because of the medical intervention
A slowly moving panorama, responsive to the movement of the viewer in the exhibition space, is projected to fill the far wall of the gallery space. As the viewer moves left, the image moves to the left and continues to move until the viewer changes location. Moving to the right moves the image to right; moving forward gradually zooms the image into pixilated close up; moving backward zooms the image out. The viewer’s actions are controlling a continuous landscape of aging, post-surgical bodies. We become both a participant and an observer.
On a side wall, a clinical stainless steel device hangs above a stainless steel shelf. When the viewer places a hand on the shelf, an intimate enlargement of their moving hand is projected into the bottom left corner of the panoramic image. 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 projected images of viewers' hands are simultaneously recorded onto videotape. This videotape of hands emerging and fading is projected by a third video projector into the right hand corner of the panorama to create a history of the experience of the installation/body.
An audio track in the exhibition space combines and overlays fragments of sound. Fictional histories in the form of voices quietly speaking of bodily change over time, musings about the body’s vulnerability, and personal history flow together with sounds that suggest transformation and cyclical actions.
In this work, my intent is to explore the shifts in the stability of our own increasingly technologized bodies and the implications this has on what it means to be human. In this work, I make a space for our bodies as adaptable, malleable and yet inexorably human.
Credits:
Victor Goertzen, Electronic Technologist
David Bowie, Photography
Richard Dyck, Video Programming