Locative Media & The City

The representation of bodies in art is ever-changing and can be studied in conjunction with cultural history. Media Study faculty member, Bernadette Wegenstein wrote “Getting Under the Skin, or How Faces Have Become Obsolete.” The article explores the fragmentation of the body in new media and film, and how the body has become “organs instead of bodies,” (OiB) a continuation from Delueze and Guattari’s theory of the “body without organs.” (BwO) Wegenstein sites several examples of how she views the fragmentation of the postmodern body becoming a body without organs, including architecture projects. For example, digital artists Aziz + Cucher created a virtual reality environment, titled Interiors (1999-present), composed of a “skin architecture.” Quoting Wegenstein, she says, “Aziz + Cucher express a desire for getting under the skin insofar as they show us digital “interiors” (paradoxically, there is no exterior to the digital environment, for it is always an “inside,” within a set frame, i.e., the screen) that are actually represented by “external material,” the human skin.” Aziz + Cucher actually turn the skin inside out in order to get underneath it. (also Diller + Scofidio’s withdrawing Room installation in San Francisco explores these issues) Wegenstein states that the face- historically considered in art to be the “window into the soul” had to be decoded and other body parts (organs, limbs, etc.) overcoded, in order to get inside the body and allow every body part the possibility to be the “window into the soul.” The Von Hagen exhibit Bodyworlds, which was in Toronto last year, so some of you may have seen it, is a good example of how internal body parts have come to be inscribed with meaning, and the face is no longer the priori of the body. The reason I’m bringing all of this up, you are probably wondering by now, is because I’m interested in how this modern representation of the body appears in locative media. Or does it? If architects, artists, marketers, and scientists are exploring turning the inside of the body out and recoding body parts, surely locative media is not excluded from this process. Cognitive mapping seems to have the potential of exploring the representation of bodies. Guy Debord’s The Naked City, 1957, is a visual fragmentation of the city. The term “cyborg” comes to mind when I see people walking the city with mobile phones, iPods, Bluetooth headsets, etc. attached to their bodies. The map that we looked at yesterday in class, the where cell phone signals at a Madonna concert where charted can also be read as a representation of bodies in a central place. We form a synthetic flesh, of sorts, with the networking of our mobile connected bodies in the city, which can be mapped. Even the words that Wegenstein uses, “coded,” “decoded,” and “overcoded,” in reference to body parts, brings to mind computer coding and cyborg bodies. I’m posting below the website for Aziz + Cucher’s Interiors project and am curious to see what you all think about this concept.

http://noorderlicht.com/eng/fest01/space/azizcucher/index.html

http://azizcucher.net/home.php