Wednesday 26 November 2014

Body parts: my video, Tony Oursler and Helen Chadwick, Samuel Beckett eye film




Body part video: using circular images, photoshopped. I like the circle effect and the fading in and out: I didn't line up the images so they don't exactly match. 










Tony Oursler    http://tonyoursler.com/     

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-q15Qf-Q64

He uses projections that speak, that float, that bulge on spherical forms. To do with identity in the digital age. The audio is an essential part of the work; do I want audio? I don't want specific words that have specific meanings. I am aiming for ambiguity.










Oursler is interested in the Uncanny Valley of robotics engineer Masahiro Mori who wrote in the 1970s of the relationship between human perception of robots and their degree of human likeness. He felt that robot design would progress to the point of extreme near resemblance to humans and that this would in fact make them more repulsive or creepy than if they were obviously machines. This raises questions about the strangeness of this near familiarity: almost "normal" but not quite can be far more disturbing than an obviously alien figure. 

I'm not  interested in the robotic so much as the body parts. My ideas about body parts were that they should be unrecognisable: making us question our perception of reality/ normality. However I think I prefer keeping them recognisable but presenting them in odd contexts.  Also from a phenomenological perspective: feeling with the body as good old Merleau-Ponty the  20th century French phenomenological philosopher said:

     
"my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world.....but because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself." 

I like the circle image, it resonates for me: we move around in our own personal circles of perception, intersecting with others yet remaining apart. My personal viewpoint can never be shared by others however much I am embodied in the world.     http://www.embodiment.org.uk/definition.htm


The objective, physiological body as opposed to the phenomenal body of experience.


Helen Chadwick: 'my apparatus is a body multiplied by sensory systems with which to correlate experience'..........a world of flux, fluidity and possibility.










 Consider presentation!!!!!!!!


Oursler :very slick presentation: precise projections. Chadwick also very neat, though grotesque. Framed; delineated.



Samuel Beckett FILM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZtV-iHeQd0
Cannot escape the gaze of oneself. One's own perception, one's self knowledge. Film takes its inspiration from the 18th century Idealist Irish philosopher, Berkeley. At the beginning of the work, Beckett uses the famous quotation: "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived) 
Idealism: that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas.
Can one disentangle the object of gaze from the experiential phenomenological pre- knowledge that one brings to the encounter. Ever see in a disinterested uninvested way.


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