In the Flesh exhibition
If we are to imagine that new technologies are 'expanded bodies' then we should take account of how our bodily intelligence has remained as a vestigial trace in our technological inventions. As we demand more control over the images and information on the screen, we have employed the hands again to help sort through it. The 'eyes on screens' have been joined by virtual hands - by the hand connected to the mouse.
The installation piece titled, 'The Light Touch' is created from an archive of photographic slides utilized as pixels. The work is a contemplation of the space of the hand on the screen. The piece measures the distance between two screen icons that serve the same function; the hand and the pointer. What shades of ontological grey distinguish the hand that grasps from the thing that points? Our hands are embedded in our minds through a complex evolution of language and thought and now, in an era that is shrugging off the body and rebuilding the sensorium around efficiencies of flow and tightening circuits of control, we should be careful that the curious and antiquated gallery experience does not disappear into the mirage we call the Graphic User Interface.
Television and film producers talk in terms of "bums on seats" and "eyes on screens". This is the price point of the image culture; the immobilized gaze of the subject is the commodity. And yet this has not been the metric of the art gallery. The art gallery does not trade in the currency of the trance. The art gallery sells you the encounter, the approach, the unfolding of your own curiosities and the bewildering stubbornness of still images.
Click each artist's name for an artist statement and images.
David Clark
