ITA ENG

where will the body be in the future?

by Tina La Porta

In this work, I explore both the potentialities and the meaning(s) of embodiment within an environment built around and within communications technologies.

Foregrounding the relationship between technology, the body, and female subjectivity within a net-worked environment, the alienation experienced when the subject comes into direct contact with the screen, the interface, and the code is the affect of the displaced embodiment which resonates within the symbolic realm of cyberspace. While the corporeal body disappears, it is replaced by an immaterial outline of our passing presence. The code, then, refers to the body's DNA structure: what becomes visible to the eye is that which is generally hidden. As we shift toward a state of immateriality, technology increasingly eliminates all traces of our material reality.

Using the model of the Network as a platform for interaction, I am interested in exploring the separation of the corporeal world implied by the use of telecommunications technology. The restrictions of our chosen technologies in many ways function as a collapsed environment for our simulated contact. Thus my work focuses in on connection and disconnection, fluctuations in transmission and reception between geographically separated participants mediated by the surface of the screen. My work represents the disembodied and dislocated nature of on-line communication through a re-combination of images and sounds as a continued exploration of presence, absence and the desire for connectivity within a global networked environment.

While viewing this work through the window of the web browser we gain access to the body only as it is situated in Cyberspace. The wireframe model of the female body is referred to as a set of instructions, a file format to be read by a CPU and displayed on it's monitor. Because the model itself is designed for mass distribution, once it has been uploaded into the virtual realm of the internet, it becomes accessible to anyone, anywhere at anytime. Thus, the female figure is everywhere and nowhere at all, invisible yet infinately replicable.

This work is a query on female identity and individuality in an era of intense technological transformation. Uploading the wireframe model of the female body into Cyberspace is a statement of the body as a model of reference-- a container of transferable information.

Tina La Porta is a contemporary artist based in New York. She works primarily with photography, new media, video, text, and installations. Her work has been exhibited widely in exhibitions in New York (including White Box, Creative Time, Universal Concepts Unlimited and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has commissioned her works); Fundacio "la Caixa," Barcelona, Spain; The New Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; The Museu da Imagem e do Som: São Paulo, Brazil; and The Apartment Project, Istanbul, Turkey amongst other international venues. in 2003 she organized a panel discussion around the exhibition Total Screen titled, ‘What is Orientalism? A cross-cultural dialogue in times of global conflict’ at Whitebox in Chelsea