Eye to I (for the Intimacy Conference)

I want to preface this paper by saying that I am speaking as a practising artist, and as such I make no claim for an objective viewpoint. Everything I say is and will be utterly subjective. The short film playing behind me is a work in progress and seems to complement my words, rather than illustrate them. In the film ‘Skin Two’, I am considering the relationship of the surfaces under the gaze and the caress of the eye, of the camera…what is, I wonder, a virtual caress?

Introduction

I offer a philosophical consideration of the impact of digital technologies on the intersubjective and interobjective dynamic generated by performance and body art. The issue of proximity needs reassessment, in the light of questions and issues initiated by these art forms, through an analysis of absence and presence. Furthermore, reconsidering how we understand visibility is vital if we are fully understand the impact of how one body connects and exchanges with another in a virtual age. Artists who work with their bodies, who engage with technology, have a significant contribution to make to the new debates about being and how the 21st century subject relates to other subjects and objects in the world. I argue that technologised performance and body art demands a new understanding of how selfhood is shaped and a reassessment of how we comprehend the limits of the 21st century body.

I will begin with some assertions:

Digitised or technologised performance works reveal that conventional ideas about subjectivity are not merely under question but utterly undone. This paper attempts to articulate a new discourse that addresses the evolution of our understanding of selfhood, of the relation of bodies to other bodies, both virtual and actual/fleshly. >>