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STRONE FEED
Video/Performance: Anna Kushnerova, Lliure Britz
Artist in Residence JoyaAiR, Almeria, Spain
HD VIDEO 5MIN. VIDEO STILLS.
FULL VIDEO > SCROLL DOWN
The work crowns the space of MOURNING for the fleeting phenomena of physicality - exploring somaesthetics, erotics and embodiment, psychoacoustics and haptic poetry.
Gasping for the physical in the inflated act of feeding the body with the sensation itself, paradoxically magnifies the state of spatial dissociation, singling a new mode of participation with and being-in the world.
The performance addresses the phenomenon of disembodiment, the neglect of the body and shifts within our sensorial capacity as humans who interact with the onscreen environment. Drawing on the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment of Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Rasmus Thybo Jensen and Joona Taipale, and their exploration of the bodily schemata as constituted spatially and localised through the sensation of touch, I confront the diminishing ‘tactuality’ (from tactility), the dissolving bodily sense.
Shusterman’s project of somaesthetics aspires to restore “the soma — the living, sentient, purposive body — as the indispensable medium for all perception”. Such heightening of somatic consciousness, would not only enhance artistic appreciation and creation, but “increase the perceptual awareness of meanings and feelings that have the potential to elevate everyday experience into an art of living” (Shusterman, 2012).
Counter to the strive for a greater mastery of the soma, the resolution of our bodily experience is evermore transferring onto the plane of virtual perception.
What are the implications of a visually led, less tactile being? Could such dis-embodiment free us into the condition of “spreading across all things” and being “at all times and everywhere” (Merlau- Ponty, 1949)? Would ‘spreading across all things’ render inter-subjectivity, enfolding it into an intrinsically self-sufficient, synthetically autopoietic* multi+intra=meta-species being?
Descend into disembodiment
To ascend into condition of eternal virtual play
*An intentional variation on ‘autopoiesis’. Here I maintain the idea of ‘self creation’, however play with a more poetic interpretation to the systems approach of biologists Humberto Maturano and Francisco Varela (who introduced ‘autopoiesis’ in 1972 to define self-maintaining chemistry of living cells).