Chiu Chih-Yung (Professor in the Interdisciplinary Program of Technology and Art, Director-designated in Graduate Institute of Art and Technology, National Tsing Hua University)
“The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception”
The excerpt above is a proposal by Merleau-Ponty on the body’s subjectivity, which can be used to help us gain further insights on the relationship between us and the world we dwell in. Merleau-Ponty argues: “I must be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the other himself…the Ego and the Alter Ego are defined by their situation and are not freed from all inherence…it is necessary that my existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but that it should take in also the awareness that one may have of it…and thus include my incarnation in some nature and the possibility, at least, of a historical situation.” (1) Merleau-Ponty understands us as “being-in-the-world,” meaning “the body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is…to be intervolved in a definite environment”; “having a body” represents that we can address ourselves as “being-in-the-world.” Through the development of industrial technology, biotechnology, and virtual technology, human corporeality has grown to share more similar features as cyborgs depicted in Hollywood films. Scientists such as Ray Kurzweil have predicted that machines will acquire human-like language abilities by 2040, and in 2099, human minds will be attached to artificial intelligence. Consequently, clear distinctions between humans and machines will cease to exist. (2) Similarly, Rodney Brooks has boldly stated that machines will become more like humans or that all humans will actually be machines. However, can machines replicate human willpower, awareness, or rationality? If we humans were to store our brains or psyches in machines, would we humans be willing to exist without our bodies? How should we confront the issues between the body and the machine, between humankind and technology? What does “corporeality” mean in the digital era?
Perhaps, humankind is venturing into a future that is unknown, but this is something that is frequently confronted in art practice, with ways to imagine and reflect on the future continually suggested. Amongst these, interdisciplinary art endeavors are being tangibly realized and rapidly integrated with theater, dance, and other forms of performance, where interdisciplinary or inter-media art practices are realized with emphasis placed on crossing and fusing together various elements of music, dance, theater, and other art forms. Curated by CHANG, I-Wen, “Digital Corporeality” is an exhibition that brings together dance, bodies, bio-politics, post-humanism, technology, and interdisciplinary contemporary art. The departure point of this exhibition is from “The Rite of Spring” and through diverse contemporary expressions of dance, reflections are conducted on the construction of body based on traditional humanism and the qualitative changes observed. The exhibition employs a strategic orchestration in a “chapter-esque” format and reveals a historical context for contemporary dance and performance video.
The exhibition kicks off with Romeo Castellucci’s human-less version of “The Rite of Spring,” which is composed with “non-linguistic modes of signification.” The performance highlights modes of signification over visual, mechanical, gravitational, and auditory elements; at the same time, a highly ethos-oriented expression, an important part of the artwork, is created via an experimental approach of technological art.
In Chapter One, “Future Body through Critical Lens,” an interrelationship between “choreography” and “cultural code” is proposed by CHANG, I-Wen, which explores body politics and socio-cultural implications in social structure and personal agency through a body practice provided via choreography-based manipulations. Artworks, “UKI virus rising 2.0” by CHEANG, Shu Lea; “Proactive Cultural Measuring Instrument II” by Kulele Ruladen; “Ballet #01” by Akinori Goto and “Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body” by Stelarc, employ images, sound, heterogeneity, uncertainty, fracture, and specific “shift-shape style” to guide the audience to partake in the works of art and to form their own meanings. As suggested by Susan Broadhurst: “…digital practices, as experimental works of art and performances, both serve as critique and have an indirect effect on the social and political…in as much as they question the very nature of our accepted ideas and belief systems regarding new technologies. In this sense, the digital does what all avant-garde art does - it is an experimental extension of the socio-political and cultural of an epoch.” (3)
The same ethos is extended into Chapter Two, “Corporeality, Materiality, and the Other,” where Sarah Westphal explores concepts of temporality, perception, and consciousness in “The Sea Within – The See Within.” The artwork turns the space into a carrier of abstract elements and examines the relations between humankind, objects, and their environment, and how the quality of a space can facilitate humankind’s corporeal experience. Within this context, the body is transformed into an embodied subject where technology and art are integrated, with unique renditions of the artwork etched out. The artwork consolidates various sound, visual, and spatial elements to form an open gesture co-constructed with media and performance arts, which translates into an aesthetic of performativity that is unique to the performance of digital art. This aesthetical transformation extends the sociocultural dimensions and perceptions of time and space, and as the body of the performer manifests into a performative subject, whether present or absent, a highly important and paradoxical existence in the context of dance video and digital performance is thus presented.
Chapter Three explores “interpassivity” through “FreeSteps AR Yours” by SU, Wei-Chia and “SBx_2045 – The Daily Life of Second Body” by Anarchy Dance Theatre and insinuates the paradox observed in participatory theater which claims to be opened for unhindered participation but is; nevertheless, restricted to specific sites. Additionally, notable features of complexity, interactivity, and techno-scape are incorporated in these digital performance practices, with interdisciplinary collaboration required for completion and digital technology applied in the stage settings, mechanical installations, and audio-visual elements. With digital performance art regarded as a form of contemporary art, audiences are invited to partake in a field where the artists’ intents are supported. This genre of performance not only offers a way to engage in unconventional narratives, and it also sees members of the audience as participants. By placing the audience in immersive designs that support site-specific creative endeavors, the participants are then required, to some extent, to interact with the performers or narrators.
Chapter Four, “AI, Big Data, and Digital Bodies,” responds comprehensively to the new trends observed in the development of contemporary innovative technology. In the past several decades, robots have increasingly been positioned at the core of performances by performing artists and technology specialists, with various scenarios of interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) explored in theater settings. Possibilities of integrating AI in performing art are also continuously explored in AI and human theater collaborations. “Anatomy of an AI System,” co-created by SHARE Lab, Kate Crawford, and others; “Facebook Algorithmic Factory,” co-founded by SHARE Lab and its co-founder Vladan Joler; and “Artificial Senses,” Kim Albrecht in collaboration with Harvard University’s metaLAB, have opened up the research and exploration on integrative application of AI, digital information, and media software. When all types of data processing are codified into different types of databases, software programs are used by artists to translate databases into perceptible representations and then used to conduct effective access of data. The results observed can be constantly displaced, split, duplicated, infinitely expanded, codified, digitized, and visualized. (4) At the same time, because of the visualization algorithm interface formed by the interconnection, exchange, and contact of communication and information networks in the technological age, the “digitalized body” is also showing signs of being delayered, visualized, monitored, and even forming purely abstract messages from interacting with the human corporeality.
Lastly, “Epilogue: AI and Future Choreographies in the 20th Century” incorporates the concept of “archive” in documentary exhibition and presents Living Archive, a collaboration between Wayne McGregor and Google Arts & Culture Lab, and “UnBearable Darkness Game Demo 2021,” a trans-spatiotemporal dance performance created by Choy Ka Fai through exploring the history of dance and database. It is pertinent to consider “when the body is ‘transformed’, composited or telematically transmitted into digital environments...it is not an actual transformation of the body, but of the pixelated composition of its recorded or computer-generated image.” (5) In other words, “using a machine [AI] to write data suggests that it is required to read and remediate it, so using it as part of the interpretation through the models encoded into the process. It may be mediated through visualization or sonification processes, providing another area that needs to be understood.” (6) At the same time, “we need to consider not only the interface and how that creates a reality but how we can use any given options or even access to the algorithms to consider the logics at play.” (7) Transforming from past focus which explored various human emotions, a focal shift is made towards the kinds of intentionality, cognition, and emotion of individuals, with further emphasis placed on social relations that highlight emotions, which considers emotions to be procedural and are a kind of social and cultural construct that can transcend beyond the individual and surpass corporeal and technological systems.
Digitality is one of significant essences of digital performances, and so is the body. Digital technology is ingeniously used by digital performing artists, and they also use digital technology as a creative means to explore the body. Different artists have different ways of applying digital technology, and some are well versed with technological applications, while others may lack technological capabilities but are able to come up with unexpected creative strategies. Meanwhile, some artists have found ways to use technology through critical perspectives, and there are also some that focus on utilitarian qualities.
In digital performances, “instrumentation is mutually implicated with the body in an epistemological sense. The body adapts and extends itself through external instruments…Rather, than being separate from the body, technology becomes part of that body and alters and recreates our experience in the world.” (8) The contemporary trend noted for liberated creativity, innovativeness, and experimental qualities is presented in “Digital Corporeality,” with responses made towards its heterogeneous diverseness, fracturedness, and avant-garde notable features. The comprehensive ethos of art embodied by digital performances is thereby presented. The exhibition further reveals the complexities observed in the technological era with human subjectivity and body-related issues. Responding to the conditions of contemporary digital performances, rapid shifts and changes with technological media are also impacting the way thoughts are conjured, with continuous displacement consequently prompted. (9) Based on the above, dance videos and digital performance practices are constantly deconstructing the borders between the body, the image, and virtuality. Innovative technological experiments are conducted which challenge traditional dance practices, and these practices share common traits of innovativeness, uncertainty, and marginality and highlight intersemiotic, intercultural, and interdisciplinary contemporary trends of thought.
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “Phenomenology of Perception.” London: Routledge. 1962, p. xii.
2 Ray Kurzweil. “The Age of Spiritual Machines.” NY: Viking. 1999, p. 27-29.
3 Susan Broadhurst. “Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology.” UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007, p.20-21.
4 Lev Manovich, ‘Database as symbolic form.’ In V. Vesna (Ed.), “Database aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007, p. 39-60; Lev Manovich, “Software takes command.” NY: Bloomsbury Academic. 2013, p. 3-4.
5 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2015, p. 212.
6 Iain Emsley, ‘Iteracies of Feeling.’ In” A Peer Reviewed Journal About: Machine Feeling,” 8 (1). 2019, p.12.
7 Iain Emsley, Iteracies of Feeling. In” A Peer Reviewed Journal About: Machine Feeling,” 8 (1). 2019, p. 13.
8 Susan Broadhurst. “Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology”. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007, p.20-21.
9 Susan Broadhurst. “Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology.” UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007, p.10-12.