Title/Date: un/body me (2021)

Author(s): Crisia Constantine and Sophie Reid-Singer.

Place of Publication: AIRspace Projects Inc (Sydney).

Format: *made in Touchdesigner. Video.

Statement:

un/body me (2021) is a video artwork (3 minutes 3 seconds) with a ‘television static’ quality imposed on disembodied fragments of a [female] body, which appears gradually in cropped shots. The artwork was a collaboration between Crisia Constantine and myself, and exhibited at AIRspace Projects Inc., a gallery in Sydney. un/body me was produced in Touchdesigner programmatically. While far from a videogame, the artwork engaged thematically with the aims of this research project to influence a perception of oneself and maintained a pursuit of cybernetic play. A portion of our didactic reads:

_{𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘣 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘺𝘮𝘣𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘯𝘶𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘣 𝘢𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦-𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘴.⁣}

Installed as a large-scale projection in a dark room painted black, conceptually the artwork evoked the womb as a metaphor for a space where identity might gestate.

Findings:

TLDR: In this artwork, the cyborg is featured on-screen as a disembodied virtual figure who materializes amidst visual noise.

Imagery of cyborgs in this videogame did not emancipate disabled peoples from the strict legal conditions imposed by the Australian Government.

However I learnt new skills for video feedback, compression, audio composition and programming logic which I carried from Touchdesigner to my projects in the Unity Game Engine. The soundtrack of un/body me is a poem spoken by Crisia which I altered using Audacity. Using audio-peeks, each line of this poem acts as an audio cue, which switches the imagery from a bloody red to a plastic bluey-green. In this way, the audio is a timeline directing the visuals.

Side Note:

un/body me also exhibited at the Queensland College of Arts as a part of The Plastics, a group exhibition of artworks which explored our corporeal relationship with non-organic plastic. Tieing our artwork to the theme of the exhibition was both the symbolic metaphor of human-nonhuman hybridism and also the method used to produce the images. The bodily assets were produced by Crisia using translucent paper, which was fed through a photocopy machine several times, (similarly to my iterative strategy for Muliebrity[i]), before being further abstracted within Touchdesigner.