Output details

Body Echoes

Origins and Context:

Body Echoes was funded as curatorial practice in the arts and cultural sectors. The research explored and developed digitally-aided processes for representing, remediating and augmenting the human body. The investigation aimed to enable new understanding of socio-cultural transformations across visual, media and performing arts. It also considered the challenges faced by female artists seeking to integrate digital technologies into their practice.

Questions:

1. How can artists combine emergent digital technologies with existing processes, tools and practices?

2. How are cultural “ways of seeing” bodies (Berger) and phenomenological ways of “working” through bodies (Schutz) transformed through the application of digital technologies to established artistic practices?

Process:

Soyinka initially used a curatorial process to select artists and pair them with digital technologists. She then designed a series of laboratory style mini-investigations and supported participants in developing and documenting their processes through photography and auto-ethnographic diaries. The findings were collectively analysed, shared and further developed in a workshop framework. Throughout the investigative process, cultural and sociological theories (in particular, Berger, Schutz and Haraway) were used to contextualise, frame and develop the research.

Context/Insights:

Through this investigative process, Soyinka and the research participants positioned digital technologies as tools that can aid, disrupt or extend embodied processes of artistic production and reception. In the research laboratories, participants used digital technologies (such as a digital video feedback circuit) to disrupt pre-existing processes and patterns of interaction. This led to the production of social and discursive spaces through which opportunities for representational, cultural or material transformation emerged.

Dissemination:

Bodies Echoes was the pivotal point in an ephemeral series of works presented through digital laboratories, workshops, exhibitions and performances nationally and internationally between 2008 and 2009. The Arts Council of Wales, Wales Arts International, The Women’s Arts Association and the British Council funded this series.