Authors:

 Scott, Jill.

Title:

 Future Bodies. Re-designing the Body as a new tri-body Model.

Keywords:

 Tri-body, philosophy, art and science, identity, creation, time, space, emergenc symbiotic, transgendered perspectives, cross-cultural, complexity verses reductionism, cultural and genetic difference.
click here to download the full paper

Abstract:

 Currently, within the realms of philosophy, art and science the idea of the human body is being discussed in terms of identity, creation, time and space. These discourses reflect the failure of the traditional human body model to represent the blurring and layering of boundaries between the imaginary body, the artificial body and the "real" (organic material) body. This paper extends the Deleuzeian concept of "the body" as a floating signifier between molar and molecular, in between being and becoming "other," wavering on the edge of constant change. It concludes that this "in-between" state could become a "in-tri-tween" state, constituting and signifying the emergence of a new body model.
This model is a symbiotic tri-body, which rises out of the virtual liquid and the organic fluid, bringing with it the shifting multiple identities of three bodies combined: the material, the artificial and the imaginary.

The new tri-body model would be a body in which interactivity, post-gendered perspectives, multiple personalities and combinations of immaterial and material surfaces would be melted together by ambiguous spatial and temporal holistic perspectives. This layering can be made via relational networks and techno-zones and here creative people have an important role to play as their metaphors can encompass notions of change as well as reflect the different complex viewpoints needed to represent such a body. Perhaps interactive media art may be an alternative platform for the representation of these enlarged concepts, as interactive situations can elucidate and explore subject of such
complexity.

This tri-body can interdependently and interactively merge with the artificial science and medicine we ourselves have created, however, within this scenario scientific "reductionism" is seen as a narrow way of understanding both the cognitive and the micro biological systems of the human body. Reductionism, denies the inherent complexity and ambiguity of this new body model as it perpetrates the idea of parts as separate from the whole. The new tri-body model must be interdependent in concept, one which questions if the human body should always be analyzed in relation to particular cultural or genetic differences.
Scott, Jill. jscott@access.ch CAiiA. University of Wales. UK Bauhaus University Weimar.Germany. Jill Scott was born in 1952, in Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited many video artworks, conceptual performances and interactive environments in USA, Australia, Europe and Japan. In 1973, she completed a Degree in Film, Art and Design from Prahran Institute of Technology, Melbourne. From 1975-1982 she lived in San Francisco, where she finished a Masters Degree in Communications from San Francisco State University, and became the Director of Site, Cite, Sight, an alternative Gallery for Sculptural Installation. In 1982 she returned to Australia to lecture in Media at the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, Sydney and since then has worked with computers leading to 3d Animation and Interactive Art. In 1992 she was invited to be a Guest Professor for Computer Animation, in the Hochschule feur Kunst, Saarbrucken, Germany, and in 1994 won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica for Interactive Art. From 1994-97 she was an Artist in Residence and project co-ordinator for the Medienmuseum at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.(ZKM) as well as a Research Fellow at The Center for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, University of Wales, Great Britain, where she was awarded a Doctoratte in Philosophy. Currently she is Professor for Installation design in the Media Faculty at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.