Thecla Schiphorst
versión en español
Thecla Schiphorst
versión en español |
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The interactive installation, Bodymaps: artifacts of mortality, deals with the sensuality and anarchy of the act of touching and being touched. This new work is an interactive, sensor-driven, and computer controlled video and sound installation. The gallery viewer's acts of touch and gesture interactively illicit movement from video images of the artist's body. These images are projected from the ceiling onto a horizontal planar surface parallel to the floor, a 'container' which forms the projection surface. This projection surface, can be read as a table, bed, river bottom, alter, vault, operating table, casket, cave, well, chamber, cartesian cell: a container through which touch and gesture transforms place and boundary.
Conditions and states such as gravity, coma, weightedness, sleep, and imprisonment are experienced through the gallery viewer's hands which stroke and caress the objects containing or holding the body.
The container holds the image of the body silent until a gallery viewer ventures close enough to stir the image. Response, a movement is activated by the viewer's proximity. When the image is stirred it will answer to the act of touch, stroke, caress, or gesture. But only during the time that the viewer remains physically engaged, connected. When the viewer distances, turns aways, the body again reverts to stillness.
The body lays breathing. The viewer entering the gallery space, moves closer to the container, enters the field of consciousness of the body, where the body's image becomes aware of the viewer's gaze and physical presence. The body stirs, the image shivers. The viewer/voyeur becomes participant, strokes the image of the body or presses the image of the container, places herself at the boundary. The viewer's action, the viewer's gesture, or even the viewer's presence may: drown the body, reveal the body, mark the body, disintegrate, embalm, arouse the body....
This interaction imbeds a relationship to sensuality and anarchy through its need for the caress. It suggests the power of the state of the dreaming body and places our relationships: acted, unconscious, mute, in reference to the contained body.
The tension between the coexisting polarities or conditions (one imposed from without, and the other silent, subversive, willed from within) construct maps that define the path of possible inhabitable and inhabited regions of body space.
Bodymaps: artifacts of mortality is being exhibited at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, from March 22nd to April19th l996, and at the Electric Dance Festival in Newcastle, UK, in May l996.
Artist's Statement Historically, my work has been focused on notions of the body, the relationship between the statistical and non-statistical representations of the body, questions of how technology mediates the representation and experience of the body, and as an extension, the representation and experience of space and of time.
My work is informed most deeply by my background and formal training in both dance/movement studies and computing science, although the piece Bodymaps is guided neither by the aesthetics of dance, nor by the aesthetics of computer science. My work is also informed by my personal experiences as a woman working as both a systems designer and an artist in highly technical spheres of influence. This includes the absolutely discontinuous frames of reference and knowledge held by these two disciplines in reference to the body, and my personal history and questions of identity and knowledge as experienced through my own body.
Dance and body training includes notions of imaging the 'extraordinary' body, experiencing and knowing ones physical self in non-linguistic ways, and developing language and practices to express this knowledge. It also includes directing awareness towards linking or connecting relationships between ones own parts (limbs, sensory systems, proprioceptive systems, mind, imagination) in order to practice and rehearse our own highly technical physical body.
Computing Science training includes notions of elegance and appreciation of mathematical or algorithmic construction and form, and tends to literally represent the body borrowing from medical mappings or often in Computer Graphics from mass cultural clichés of representation. My interest lies in the recognition that I am dealing with two highly technical systems each with their own technical language and frames of reference, that of the human body on the one hand, and that of computer technology on the other hand.
Biography: |
THECLA SCHIPHORST is a computer media artist, choreographer, dancer, and computer systems designer. She has been working with the choreographer, Merce Cunningham in New York City for the past six years, in an ongoing relationship supporting his creation of new dance using the computer choreographic system Life Forms. She is one of the members of the original design team that created Life Forms. She has an interdisciplinary M.A. in computer compositional systems from SFU, and undergraduate degrees in dance and computer systems. She is currently exploring the use of motion capture and gestural input as a real time interface for performance. Thecla is the Artistic Director for "immerce" sponsored by the Centre for Image and Sound Research, in Vancouver. This interactive media project is the recent winner of three International Digital Media Awards. She travels and conducts workshops internationally speaking about culture, body and technology. She is the Co-Director of "the Shadow Project: Interactive Performance Technology Workshop for Artists," and past director and faculty member at the Simon Fraser University Computed Art Summer Intensive. She has been a faculty member at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, and is past chair of the 1995 Conference on Dance and Technology. She is co-director of Digital Earth, a new non profit society dedicated to exploring connections in arts, culture, and cyberspace. |