The Public Body .03

Previous iterations of Artspace Sydney’s exhibition series The Public Body aimed to reprogram the audience’s perception of the way the human body has been cast and classified by the zeitgeist of contemporary Western society, firstly through a post-pornographic lens and then a post-colonial point of view. With this final instalment we consider the ‘post-human’ body. ‘The Public Body .03’ redefines the body as fragmented, yet whole, unconscious yet evolving – an atomic level of materiality. Information about the physical form exists anew, stored as binary values inside our silently whirring hard drives.

‘The Public Body .03’ questions digital identity, stored (and owned) by Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Spotify, to name just a few major contenders. Does it have a body of its own? If we can have a digital identity, can it be conceptualised that a digital body would come with it, hand-in-hand? Is it comparable to a twin, or a clone – not connected through consciousness, but valid as an identical being even without its original? Is it simply an analogue of our current body yet on an atomic scale, existing as fibre optic light particles or a binary value represented on a screen? The rhetoric these questions introduce is something I believe the medium of art – as it stands today, and the practices contemporary artists take in communicating ideas – is best suited to.

Patricia Piccinini, Ghost, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

This neohuman body is Other to us – we often get caught up in dualism, believing the body is only a vessel for a mind. The body is rather a mode of existing in the world, as conceptualised by French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Our excitement in entertaining the idea that the mind exists independent of the brain has made us careless in understanding the phenomenological implications of posthumanism. Our rushed conceptualisation is most apparent in the way we view our eyes – always more connected to consciousness than flesh, and of course it is more intuitive to our lived experience to think this way, yet upon closer, more logical examination, our eyes are no less bodily than our feet and they touch light just as our fingers touch the world.

The swan song of the series is also an open ending. The gallery introduces speculative ideas about our future, for example, the advent of body modification technology which allows people to become bionically augmented or enhanced, and the increasing popularity of AI and voice assistants. Today, with the rise of machine learning, customised algorithms and neural networks, technology has more potential than ever to begin to truly understand us as individuals – in terms of knowing what we like, how we make decisions and the way we choose to complete tasks.

‘The Public Body .03’ launches the body beyond the physical into the nebulous net of cyberspace. We as humans are no longer defined simply by our current material forms and the actions they undertake. We now exist spread thin, unconscious, as our data lurks in strange corners that take up no physical space.

 

Saira Krishan is an emerging arts writer based in Sydney.

Artspace
30 August to 28 October, 2018
Sydney

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