George Themistokleous
Leeds Beckett University, UK
Digitized and Re-Doubled Bodily Images
Through a custom-made installation space entitled the diplorasis -translated as doubled vision- I will re-consider the intertwining between digital /analog media and the body. Within the diplorasis, participants unexpectedly perceive themselves in three-dimensionalized and manipulated forms. A whole range of digital and analog media assemblages re-configure an image of the participant that acts as a bodily prosthetic extension. As the organic body is positioned in relation to its computational prosthetic extensions, embodiment becomes mediated through informational processes. In How we Became Posthuman literary critic N. Kathrine Hayles states that the computer’s capabilities ‘indicate how the user’s sensory-motor apparatus is being trained to accommodate the computer’s responses’ (1999, 47). And ‘central to the construction of the cyborg are informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions’ (1999, 47). Echoing this line of thought, in the diplorasis the space of the immediate environment conflates with the participant’s self-image. The bodily participant is overwhelmed with an image that exceeds one’s perceptual faculties. The paradoxical interval between the sensing body and its projected image radically distorts our notion of technics; giving way to what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls an "eventization" (1998, 15). As digitized imaging increasingly conflates with (in) the bodily schema one questions the very boundaries between body and its prosthetic technologies. The body’s perceiving coordinates, its mnemonic capacities shift with these actual and virtual environments. Machine and human intelligence are thus placed at this interval– the one being implicated through the other via a moment of arrest.
_______
George Themistokleous (www.para-sight.org) is a media artist, architect and lecturer in architectural design, history and theory. He has studied architectural design, theory and art history. The inter-disciplinary scope of his doctoral research operates between media, art and architecture. His practice focuses on the changing relationship between visuality and space-time through emerging media that probe conventional limits between self and self-image, interior and exterior. The intertwined theoretical and design work is based on custom-made interactive multi-media installations. The visual and written work has been presented, exhibited and published internationally in various platforms; more recently the latest media installation project has been presented at the ‘Venice Architectural Biennale – Cyprus Pavilion 2018’ and the ‘10th Beyond Humanism Conference’, as well as The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (Buchner Verlag), Visual Research Methods in Architecture (Intellect, forthcoming), Dark Space_the interior - Idea Journal, Volume 02: Projection - Inflection, Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines – Acadia 2016, Stratifications, Folds, De-stratifications - Lo Squaderno, Format Matters - Edinburgh Architecture Research (forthcoming), The Architectural Review, Aberrant Nuptials – Deleuze and Artistic Research DARE2017, Imaginaries of the Future: Body and Media 01 (OLH), Site Magazine v. 39 amongst others. He is co-editor with T.Stoppani and G. Ponzo of the book This Thing Called Theory (Routledge).