![\"Benedict](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/blue-hand_lighter.jpg\")
Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll (Detail), 2014, courtesy the artist and Matts Gallery, London<\/p>\n Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll (Detail), 2014, courtesy the artist and Matts Gallery, London<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we sleep, computers are evolving into a collective being. When they finally become self-aware, they will inevitably take endless screenshots of themselves to make up for the fact that they have no face.\u201d These lines from artist Lawrence Lek\u2019s fictional essay \u201cIntel\u2019s Dreaming\u201d, published in independent magazine Art Licks in 2013, capture a new idea of the computer and the physical form. A figure is evolving in contemporary art, but its digital body is fragmented, made of body parts growing like cloned ears in a Petri dish.
\nPost-internet floating body parts have art historical precedent. The fragment has been desirable ever since aesthetes began to fetishise Greco-Roman sculptural fragments in the 18th century. The fragmentary body has been interpreted by post-psychoanalytic feminist theory as representation of the objectification and violent dismantling of the (largely female) body. The pornographic gaze is one that enforces a form of visual fragmentation, reducing the Whole into broken digestible, absorbable parts \u2013 like the viewpoint of a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
\nAlthough each of the artists included in this portfolio have individual artistic intentions and approaches, seen together they raise some very interesting questions \u2013 notably how the body in art is a reflection of a post-human concept of the body, and how these objects and images reflect a prescient computer or digital avatar in search of a body that is near the human.<\/p>\n
![\"Aleksandra](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Alans-Apple-DOMANOVIC-2013-0062a.jpg\")
Aleksandra Domanovic, Alan’s Apple, 2013, Laser-sintered PA plastic, polyurethane, Soft-Touch and brass finish, 9 x 11 x 19.5 cm, Unique, courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin<\/p>\n
Furthermore, these artworks together feel like a manifestation of the digital \u2018uncanny\u2019. This Freudian definition of discomfort was inspired by masks, clowns, dolls or reflections, and is reflected in the work of surrealist artists like Hans Bellmer or the writing of George Bataille. A digital version of the uncanny feels like an extension of these ideas in the same way that science fiction is a 20th century version of the 19th century Gothic. A recent example of this was British video artist Ed Atkins\u2019 film \u201cDave\u201d, shown as part of his \u201cRibbons\u201d solo show at London\u2019s Serpentine Gallery in summer 2014. Featuring images of a disembodied head bouncing down stairs on loop, viewed in unison with the other videos from the show depicting various other disembodied parts, it\u2019s evocative of Frankenstein\u2019s murderous monster, itself stitched together from borrowed flesh.
\nNonetheless, many of these works do not engender fear; the heads and hands feel removed, detached, robotic, lacking in emotion or presenting a performance of the emotional. These eyes, hands, heads, noses, teeth and lips appear to exist in a different realm, stuck in digital limbo \u2013 half human, half tech \u2013 as if to illustrate the failure of technology to authentically replicate humanity, and the failure of art to represent this disjunction.
\nElsewhere, other artists such as the UK\u2019s Benedict Drew, Denmark\u2019s Nina Beier and Simon Dybbroe M\u00f8ller, and Slovenia\u2019s Aleksandra Domanovic also use disembodied hands but to different ends. In Drew\u2019s gothic, psychedelic video work they become futuristic quivering limbs reminiscent of Thing from the Addam\u2019s Family. Conversely, Beier\u2019s hands \u2013 scuffed reproductions of sculptures by Rodin painted to look Caucasian and thrown haphazardly on the ground \u2013 possess a critique of art history itself. \u201cWhat is to be remembered, when all history is destined to be discarded and forgotten?\u201d They seem to imply. However, it is Domanovic\u2019s hands that feel the most powerful \u2013 robotic prosthetics referencing Serbian scientist Rajko Tomovic\u2019s pioneeering artificial limbs. Here the digits and position of the hand touch on technological history and feminism as much as the spiritual and art historical positions of this limb in visual history.<\/p>\n
![\"C\u00e9cile](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Cecile-B-Evans-THE-BRIGHTNESS-2013-HD-video-courtesy-of-the-artist-commissioned-by-Orange-and-the-Palais-de-Tokyo-still-2.jpg\")
C\u00e9cile B.Evans, The Brightness, 2013, HD video, 4:48 min, commissioned by Orange and the Palais de Tokyo, courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London<\/p>\n
Yet it isn\u2019t just the hand that\u2019s becoming an obsession in contemporary art. German-born artist Luice Stahl\u2019s scanner assemblage images tear away the veil of technology revealing their inner workings, much like an MRI scan of a brain. Antoine Catala from the US focuses on the buttocks and the UK\u2019s Neil Rumming\u2019s nose can be interpreted as a reimagining of John Baldessari\u2019s famous paintings featuring nasal cavities. For other creatives such as C\u00e9cile B. Evans and Laura Buckley, computer rendered limbs become pathways to other thoughts, each highlighting how we project meaning onto digital images. Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll (Detail), 2014, courtesy the artist and Matts Gallery, London \u201cWhile we sleep, computers are evolving into a collective being. When they finally become self-aware, they will inevitably take endless screenshots of themselves to make up for the fact that they have no face.\u201d These lines from artist Lawrence Lek\u2019s fictional…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[1028,1029,38,2406,2407,2408,1406,2409,1096,502,288,380,2410,2411,2412,2413,261,2414,1035,1167,1194],"class_list":["post-20097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-aleksandra-domanovic","tag-antoine-catala","tag-art","tag-benedict-drew","tag-body","tag-body-art","tag-cecile-b-evans","tag-computers","tag-digital-art","tag-ed-atkins","tag-francesca-gavin","tag-hito-steyerl","tag-internet-art","tag-laura-buckley","tag-lucie-stahl","tag-neil-rumming","tag-nina-beier","tag-post-internet","tag-post-internet-art","tag-sculptor","tag-simon-dybbroe-moller"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nIn his 2012 essay \u201cA Thing Like You and Me\u201d, the German filmmaker Hito Steyerl argued: \u201cIdentification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they\u2019d actually like to be a JPEG file. And this is precisely my point: if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation.\u2026 Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad.\u201d
\nIndeed, what the body parts in these diverse range of works all have in common is that they too could be described as \u2018good-bad objects\u2019 \u2013 things that we can identify on an anthropocentric level (good) yet still seem unreal or inauthentic (bad). Ultimately, what these objects and images \u2013 failures and ghostly representations \u2013 remind us of is that the parts are just as fascinating and filled with meaning as the whole.
\n
\nCurated Portfolio and Text by Francesca Gavin<\/a><\/strong> \nHANDS OFF!, a show curated by Francesca Gavin, is on from 12 March – 5 April 2015, at Horseandpony Fine Arts<\/a>, Berlin, featuring some of the artists in this portfolio.<\/strong> \n
\nMehr:\u00a0Interview with\u00a0Ai Weiwei,\u00a0\u201cThe Internet is my life and Twitter is my nation\u201d<\/a><\/strong> \nMehr:\u00a0The Museum of Internet<\/a>\u00a0is creating new iconographies<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"