Dead Centre the body with organs (1999)

In Dead Centre the body with organs (The Performance Space, Sydney 1999), Maria Miranda and I were interested in working with live performance in new media installation art. Theoretically we wanted to explore changes to subjectivity happening in digital culture. The work played with the reconfiguration of organs and the senses in computer culture, figuring the computer as one (among others) particular incarnation of our organs. It listened to and envisioned computers as organs of digestion and excretion, transmission and emission.

Much recent theory and discussion about computers place them in the realm of the brain or the mind, as if the body ('meat') and its senses have been erased or left behind. But this didn't get to the heart and viscera of the matter from our point of view as artists. As you scan in your images or digitise your sounds, you subject them to a digestion process carried out by you and the computer together. As digestion it can be messy, noisy and undisciplined and it can produce unexpected eruptions. Its transmissions and excretions can appear anywhere - downloaded and projected onto unexpected surfaces, transmitted through the Net, pulsing through a space.

Listening to the body and the organs as cultural is one of the central concerns of the project. Organs are figured and experienced differently by different cultures and in different moments of history. How do Italians know where their livers are? Why don't Bengalis distinguish their hearts from their livers? And why was Australia imagined as having a 'dead centre'? And, finally, what organs do computers support/replace and what are the organs of the computer? These are the sort of questions – serious and playful at the same time -- that bear the trace of culture and computer culture into the very body itself, into its organs. Dead Centre engaged with these questions by sounding out, projecting, and transmitting the visceral embodiments and vital transmissions of bodies/organs/computers --using low-end technology to interrogate the low end of the body, and itself.

The installation was a collaborative work. It started from a previous incarnation as radiophonic essay (Norie Neumark) for the Listening Room. I reworked voice material from that piece and wrote texts, which Amanda Stewart performed, for recording in her own style. I then reworked the sound with those texts. Maria Miranda made the computer animation and the sculptural installation. Greg White contributed the pulses and programming. Conceptually I thought of this process as the sound digesting performance; images and animations digesting sound and performance; and live performance digesting sound and the animations. The installation site was a serious/playful space for performance and participation. The room, organ-like, pulsed with immersive sound, which responded both to Amanda Stewart's live performances and, when she was not performing, to the interactivity of the participants. During the live performance, Amanda Stewart interacted with the pre-recorded sound (including herself) and the images, more and more each night – becoming part of the installation -- though still working in her characteristic stereo mic performative way. And there were traces of her performance resounding in the space, even when she wasn't there.

The sound moved around the room, in a circular way, between 4 pairs of speakers. This movement was to draw people out of a static ‘audience' position, to invite them to enter into the organic space. The interactivity worked as a subtle, at first imperceptible tendency (rather than instant triggering) which was appropriate for the vicissitudes of pulsing, organic bodies. As people stepped on a sensor mat, slowly the underlying pulse drew out from the particular sound playing at that moment and moved it into the foreground, creating a sense of the room as a pulsing organ.

The sound and image synced only loosely. Maria Miranda used the computer's insides, working with the material 'thingness' of the machine -- the motherboard, circuit board. She composed images that playfully mimicked x-rays, showing organs and circuit boards entangled with historical images from medical history. She also worked with projection - psychological and literal. The images were projected onto silk through film. These materials were chosen for their relevance to the making of computer circuit boards. Animations were projected onto mirrors -- doubled, multiplied -- to fill the space with movement and colour.

We re-worked Dead Centre for the internet, with the net. art work Machine Organs. Thinking about the net's virtual space and limited bandwidth, I decided to focus on the the cacophonies of noisy visceral bodies as I re-digested the sound and texts. One of the things I found interesting in the process was negotiating the tension between the attraction of messy digestion and the (then) imperative of ‘clean' digital sound, especially for low quality computer speakers.

Artists

• Miranda, Maria
• Miranda, Maria and Norie Neumark
• Neumark, Norie

Works by Same Artist

• Hollow Man Rumour
• The Museum of Rumour
• Volcano (2001)