The Body (W)hole by Diana Burgoyne
Title:
- The Body (W)hole
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
In The Body (W)hole, two performers each wear a shirt with a camera in the front and a monitor placed on the back. As they interact with each other, the camera and monitors create the illusion of light passing through each performer’s body.
The performers move though a space with hidden tight sources and videos projected into the space which only appear on the monitors when the performer moves into the projected beam. Infra-red light – unseen by the naked eye – will however be visible to the camera/monitor shirts.
A second element of the piece uses the camera inserted into the shirt as a data collector. Each one of the camera’s 36 photocells will stream data onto the Scrambled Bytes website. Once there the data can be retrieved, mapped and placed in a new context by anyone accessing the site.
The Body (W)hole is an example of electronic folk art. I have created a camera using photocells and a monitor using LEDs. The material is assembled not on a circuit board but ‘freehand’, allowing the colours, shapes and lines of the electronic components to dictate the aesthetics of the piece. Assembling the material in this way creates a work that appears hand-made — an attempt to humanize the sanitary technology-materiel. This work meets the criteria for folk art by using materials and information available at Radio Shack, at a cost of about $20.00. With only a little soldering experience the piece could be created by anyone.
During the Fashion Show, Diana Burgoyne uses a camera and monitor as a way of passing light through a performer’s body.
