Body-Me: The Body in the Age of Digital Technology
"The Body in the Age of Digital Technology“ presents a thematic selection of artistic positions that address changing sensory experiences of physicality in terms of the self and a collective Other.
Since the late 1960s, digital technology has brought about a rapidly advancing process of dematerialization, disembodiment and virtualization. As individuals’ daily actions and social interaction in general increasingly move to computer-based platforms, digital media becomes the filter for these experiences. Consequently, physical, sensory and social experiences are shifting to a predominantly virtual and mental plane. As a result, shifts in the frames of reference for subject and object, self and other and man and machine sometimes become so extreme that the boundary between the internal and the external dissolves and hybrid forms emerge.
The exhibition will present a selection of artistic approaches that consider the human body, its mutability, fragility, and ephemerality in the context of a digital and technologized society, transforming the body into material for artistic creation and a medium for posing fundamental existential questions. How do we experience our bodies’ physical limits? Who am I without my body? Who am I without the technological means that enhance it? How do technological socialization and the day-to-day world determine the construction of identities in this day and age?