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| Marilene Oliver Scan sculpture of "real person" |
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| Marilene Oliver A Melanix sculpture?? |
In her talk Marilene Oliver spoke mainly about the pieces on show, with emphasis on the MRI
technology. I would like to have heard
her speak more about her general interest in digital technology and its
relations to us. In the catalogue she
says that her original aim was to reclaim the body from the “medical and
digital gaze” and retain human and embodied relationships. At that stage she was working with clear and
transparent materials, using screen printing and laser cutting. The scans were of real people that she knew
(her family) - “to offer a life-size, real- time encounter with digital copies
of human body”.
In 2007 she started to work with a programme called
Melanix. This digital programme represents an anonymous body, in this case (like the artist) a woman, white, female, under
forty. It is a kind of mri
scan which could be “reformed and rematerialised to suit Oliver’s changing ideas
and impressions”. Flesh can be virtually removed
to expose bone and vein. She uses the term “Virtual
leakage” – mixing the digital and the real in her sculptural objects, all
created on the computer.
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| Street scene in Brazil (google images) |
But as an
artist “who works to challenge Post Humanism”, Oliver embellished her
sculptures with embodied techniques such as beading and weaving to “embody” the
materialisations of Melanix. She
has recently been living in Brazil, and spoke about the way of life there. There is so much material there available as
decoration (the carnival culture), so much focus on using the body for display
and as means of expression. There are scanning shops on every corner in Rio,
for example, and readily available plastic surgery to improve image and shape.
Now living in
Angola, Oliver is rethinking the significance and symbolism of the scanning
technology, as this is rarely available
in sub-Saharan Africa. She is now using
the Melanix model in the cultural context of Angolan values., Her work for the
Edinburgh exhibition is a series of etchings showing the Melanix figure wearing
elaborate hair braids or being bitten by
a giant mosquito, for example.
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| Marilene Oliver Melanix and the mosquito |
I found the work at this exhibition quite
disturbing. In spite of the rational technology, Oliver explores dark and primitive holes of
mind and body, the most basic level of
our existence and identity. But at the
same time (perhaps this is not a contradiction) she is exploring very
contemporary and artificial media, using digital technology to explore the
human body, and to how we relate to new media.
She quotes Hans Moravec on how we need to “download our consciousness to the datascape in
order to survive”. Her work opens up many interesting questions and links to the subject of our relationship to the digital.
Some references:
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Steve Nichols Post Human
Manifesto
Pepperell's The
Posthuman Condition
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