 |
|
|
|
|
Conceptual outline from original proposal
Away from the grand socio-economic narratives which have written the first chapter of the digital era, the crucial value of digital technologies and their direction within limited lines of interactivity lies not in any way they have reconfigured the individual, but in the ways that they have rendered the body immaterial, invisible and indistinguishable. In an overload of buzzing strobing screens, extruded plastic buttons, blurred anti-aliased scans and crackling waveform samples, everything from a jittery Quicktime of Pamela Anderson on celebrityslut.com to a lo-res jpeg of a carrot on greengrocer.com becomes an instance of distended identification and distanced consumption. As their virtuality collapses into a well of dissimulation, they resemble each other more than they appear differentiated. Far from either touching Pamela’s silicon breast or smelling the acidic bite of genetically-modified carrots, the on-line consumer enjoys a hyper-distancing which serves to increase parafilliac tendencies in the face of abstracted renderings of clear objects of desire.
Viewed from this angle, the fetishization of the virtual is a deluded celebration of the repressed, while the impulse to ‘interact’ – by jerking one’s forefinger to spurt forth a stream of compressed data through optical fibre – is a naïve yet pathological will to penetrate. It is specifically this will to penetrate wombic, vaginal, colonic and penile dimensions that The Body Malleable project addresses. Intended as an outright re-sexualization of the core impulse betwixt the line of interactivity, The Body Malleable targets the denial of psychosexual duplicity in the actioning of interactive design and implementation. Its interactive module accents the insertable dimension rather than the ejaculative trigger points of interaction which govern the ‘touch’ mechanisms of mouses and hot keys. In blunt contrast to the ejaculatory, emissive, streamed and showering exchanges which splatter the flattened screen – itself no more than a ‘vertically prostrate’ vanishing plane – The Body Malleable both accepts the sexual drive behind all acts of interaction and broadens its horizon into a malleable realm of polysexuality.
Audience projection from the original proposal
The audience for this project is the same audience that has suffered movies by Steven Spielberg for the last 20 years: anyone from six to sixty-six years old. This work is rated G for gender, PG for post-gender, M for malleable and R for repressed. It is specifically aimed at you, your children and your parents.
The attractions for this work are its simultaneous exploitation of sex and the usability it has for those interested in sexual vicariousness. It is laterally pornographic and as such combines seduction with repulsion; titillation with identification. The humour and novelty of its interface design will provide a safety mechanism for the user to have an actual experience of sexual realignment as he/she/it morphs body shapes and parts in a flux of sexual variables. The lack of identifiable stasis while physically interacting with a module is the crux of The Body Malleable’s interactive experience.
Catalogue statement from the premiere ACMI exhibition "2004 - Australian Culture Now"
You want to stick your finger in, but once you do, it gets messy. Not with fluids, but with form. The internal becomes the external. Dark moist crevices are aerated into protruding spongeforic shapes. Hard becomes soft – grows thin – gets fat. The body becomes a bulbous breathing trail of possibilities for your own body, the body you want, and the body with which to connect. The penile and the vaginal roll and flutter like a series of hot flushes, but they are degendered by their incessant drive to become the other. Bi, gay, straight are social costumes to be left at the door. You are now a slug: socially blind yet sexually primed. The colon and its polysexual route to infinite Otherness beckons you. There is no turning back once the body becomes malleable.
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy