My Media-Body XXXLARGE

My Media Body XXXLARGE

Medium: Interactive Installation with Haptic Sensing VR program

Date: Winter 2020


My Media Body XXXLARGE is an interactive installation that immerses viewers in a bodily experience of media usage and the immense accumulation of data. The piece demonstrates how corporeal bodies have become interwoven with incorporeal forms of data through media engagement. It speculates how the body is extended and expanded through the production and aggregation of data. The viewer’s body is imagined as a super-structure composed of both physical and virtual material, existing on earth and in the cloud, constructed from the integration of biological and information systems.





Xbox Kinect is used to trace the movement and position of the viewer’s body. Viewers can interact with media icons on the screen of a large phone with their whole body. They must bend, turn, squat, twist in order to reach the apps on the screen. The single touch of a finger that is normally exercised to open apps is exaggerated to a full-body interaction. Upon body-to-media contact, computational information in the form of machine language streams into existence. They encircle the viewer’s body then extend into the cloud.





Viewers can explore their body as generators of data and experience data as an immediate extension of their bodily activity. With every touch, the swarm of data grows bigger and bigger. The performance of the viewer’s body produces and exponentially accumulates a virtual monstrosity that is in direct relation to their physical body. The corporeal and the incorporeal become structurally linked, and the human body is reimagined as part of a larger complex of both physical and virtual forms. The project thinks through Stacy Alamo's Transcorporeality in the context of media usage, and imagines the bigness of our bodies in relation to media and massive data production.




References

  • Alaimo, S. (n.d.). [online] Stacyalaimo.com. Available at: http://www.stacyalaimo.com/single-post/2019/07/30/Transcorporeality-Exhibit-at-Museum-Ludwig-Cologne-92019-12020.