Distracted Bodies

‘Distracted Bodies’ is an ‘inter-global’ collaboration between different time zones, intersecting between the South Pacific and the Northern Hemisphere, manipulating time and site through complex structures of the digital and the ‘real’. Relationships, both within the work and in the making of the work are constructed through illusions of presence and absence via chaotic and disparate use of time, place, distance and perception.

The performance installation we will be presenting examines post-structural connections between time, place, the body and screen using integrated systems and their re/formation and re/presentation in concurrent cultural sites. Specifically, the work takes place via digital interfaces overlapped through actions by performers whose cognate costumes make differences of identity and site interchangeable and yet culturally awry. Chat rooms are a dialogic model and ideational reservoir for the intercultural dialectics and intimate exchange value for the proposed work Distracted Bodies.

With this premise in mind the artists/researchers working on this project seek to engage the space that intervenes between the internal and external world. Control and management of the embodied experience is manipulated and regulated in such a way as to give the viewer an illusion of a corporeal, sartorial, and spatial ‘real’ whilst changing the way the ‘real’ is framed and enacted. The installation includes participatory tools allowing the viewer to influence such realities by manoeuvring avatars in a seemingly real-time mimetic scenario. Through restructuring time, place and the body the viewer experiences a shift in kinaesthetic awareness. Distance and place becomes ambiguous, and the exchange between the screen windows appears to be taking place between two separated countries over the net when the reality could be the exchange occurring between two rooms in the same building.

Erving Goffman discusses the way we frame and present ourselves in modern communities.  The tonus of the interaction in today’s world is moderated and conditioned by keeping up appearances and by controlling and managing the embodied experience.  The control and care in which people exercise in conditioning our external surface, in particular the entrance and exit points of the body, enable the transitions between the internal and external.

Extending Goffman’s manipulated and ‘framed’ self, the artists create an imaginary environment for people to meet and exchange experiences. These are identities that take reference from the world around us, in physical space as well as an imagined space to the degree that new physical features are appliquéd that only resembles the known body (cf., e.g., animalistic images included in supporting material). The invented bodies will be accommodated and come alive in various different sites and countries. They will inhabit the sites and communicate back and forth through sound and body language in the form of disrupted dance.

The effect of the work inclines toward the performatively absurd and perceptibly uncanny. It aims to enact approaches to the screen as applied plastic surgery where a surface reality can be made to stand in for another’s face or function as a cover for the actual. Negotiated through the modality of screen appearances, the manipulative presentation of selves can substitute manufactured flesh for real flesh. Ontological escape lines cut across phantasmatic limits, transforming clear demarcations into fluid spaces of indeterminate but prospective transitions and reconstructions.

The Presentation

The artist’s presentation will ‘perform’ a demonstration of the performance installation proposed for ISEA 2009. The presentation for SCANZ will demonstrate scenes from the installation using performance techniques, video documentation and will ‘talk to’ the making and testing of the performance installation structure. Costume/avatars will be interwoven into the performative nature of the presentation. The presentation will follow an intensive workshop period between both artists as they base themselves in New Zealand for a period of two weeks, prior to the SCANZ Symposium. Live networking between two sites could be for the presentation if feasible, and firewalls may have to be temporarily disengaged. Folding in a live distortion of time and place will be an integral part of the presentation. Illusion and displacement are imbued thematically in the work, and the performance artists seek to embody the presentation with these characteristics which are explored in the installation.

Becca Wood – I have trained in both Visual Communications in Design and Contemporary Dance. Since the late 1990’s I have been making and performing in hybrid works that cross between performance and installation. I am a Movement Lecturer in the Acting Department at Unitec, Auckland, and also lecture in interdisciplinary arts. I am studying at AUT, completing my Honours year and continuing with Masters in Spatial Design in 2009.

Amanda Newall – I am an interdisciplinary artist, teacher and scholar who has worked and exhibited in Australasia as well as in the United States, England, Scotland, and Argentina. I am working as a lecturer at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University in the UK since 2005, with responsibility for interdisciplinary art, installation, curatorship and professional practice.    

KEYWORDS:

performance installation digital real manipulation