Digital technology is increasingly integrated into our daily lives. We collect information about our performance, endurance and ourselves on the basis of apps, digital extensions and portable measuring equipment. In this exhibition curators Nikolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk and Jesse van Oosten artistic positions gathered around the body with which we are inextricably linked to our digitalized society and data economy.
In a world increasingly determined by calculations, data and information, by software-driven infrastructures, the 'quantified self' can be seen as symptomatic of the current zeitgeist, characterized by fleeting relationships and an accelerated sense of time.
Our digital bodies and identities have become part of an economy of clicks, tracks, traces and likes, with a few powerful companies capitalizing on the content that is self-generated by its users. Does this interaction between the human body and digital technology really contribute to a more insightful, qualitative form of self-knowledge and identity formation? Digital extensions and prostheses of the body often offer a solution for certain facets of daily life, but which domains lie outside the framework of a technofix for an optimized life?
Digitized bodies
Nowadays it seems less and less valid to speak of a boundary between the virtual and physical domain. Digital processes are ubiquitous and deeply rooted in the structure of our daily living and working practices. Artist duo Momu & No Es hooked with their video installation 'Highway' responds to this fact by presenting a digital parallel universe in which the distinction between tangible reality and the digital disappears.
Miloš Trakilović looked at the intertwining of the digital and the human body in a series of prints and a performance-lecture, in which he explores the restrictions and dimensions of the human body through a series of exercises based on military manoeuvres and a story about a flight over a mountain range.
In this ambiguous and hybrid living environment, the human body relates to the environment in a networked manner. Jenna Sutela explored this relationship in the science fiction video essay 'When You Moved', looking at the frictions between the time and experience of the human body and that of technology. Her video explores the different ways in which humans subject their habits to technology, and how the body thus develops an increasingly isolated and passive relationship with its environment.
Kate Cooper introduced the installation 'Eexperiments in absorption' the question of what it means to be immersed in an environment, a material, or someone else's emotions.
Alexandra Navratil reflected in the video work 'Revitalise' on standards from ergonomics and thermodynamics for the optimal functioning of the human body during work situations.
Fragrance artist Maki Ueda explored a domain of the body that cannot be digitalized, and developed an installation in which she attempted to index the phenomenon of sweat and the different types of human body odors – a subjective domain that cannot be captured in statistics and digital data.
Technology and language
Not only the fabric of human existence, but also the way we communicate about it is influenced by technology. In this fragmented age in which written language is increasingly supplemented with images or adapted forms of communication, such as emoticons, Amy Suo Wu With 'TLTRNW (Too Long To Read And Write)' we explore the way we construct our identities through language, and how this is influenced by technology.
Spoken language is also not free from codification. The audio work 'Text-to-Speech' by Anna Zett focused on the standardized, universal language of text-to-speech software – often used for voice-overs – where the voice exists autonomously, without the presence of the human body.
Anni Puolakka & Jenna Sutela investigated untraceable and non-codifiable forms of language within their sound essay and installation 'Attention Spa'.