Corpoirreality
Nadezhda Bei (Надежда Бей)
@Speculum Artium 2021
The artwork explores a phenomenon of duality of a biological and a digital body, acceptance and understanding, what a real body is, through digitalizing it by making movements.
Digital body is what we gain and grow each time we enter the Internet or VR. The content we consume becomes a nutrient, and the actions we make become our borders. And while there is an emerging discourse in praise of beauty for any body, we focus mostly on corporeality, not considering digital traces of a new body we own.
At the same time, the physical body receives more positive attention than ever, we notice that it possesses a unique fluidity that can actually be traced in virtual space. Such traces are like marks, invisible to strangers, penetrate the skin in and out, yet trying to explore and explain the nature of biological structure that forms us as humans.
In the video performance, media archaeology artefacts reveal an invisible network in which a body is being tied more and more with each action.
Corpoirreality is aimed to make a visitor get acquainted with bodies, understand them deep and tenderly, and in the end, accept them in all of their states. second part, the visitors are welcomed to leave the trace of their own body in a common virtual space filled with figures of previous participants and ones prepared by the artist.
Synopsis:
The artwork consists of two parts: a video performance and an interactive installation with a VR headset. The video tells a story of acceptance, fears and excitement at the flowing shift from the digital body to the biological one, back and forth. In the second part, the visitors are welcomed to leave the trace of their own body in a common virtual space filled with figures of previous participants and the ones prepared by the artist.
