DYSCORPIA: FUTURE INTERSECTIONS OF THE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY

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Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Kule Institute for Advanced Study, Edmonton Arts Council, University of Alberta

Dyscorpia, 2019

UofA Museums Galleries at Enterprise Square Edmonton, 10230 Jasper Avenue

DYSCORPIA is an exhibition gathering artists and thinkers in visual art, design, contemporary dance, medical humanities, virtual reality, sound creation, computer science, and creative writing in order to question what it means not to know the limits of our bodies in the face of new technologies. DYSCORPIA is not science-fiction. DYSCORPIA is historical time and biological time entangled. It forces past and future in a deadlock, so the present can be squeezed inside out for you to see.

DYSCORPIA features the work of over 16 international, national, local artists as well as students from the University of Alberta; Blair Brennan, Kasie Campbell, Daniel Evans, Gary James Joynes, Isabelle Van Grimde (Montreal), Royden Mills, Jason Nelson (Australia), Yves Netzhammer (Switzerland), Marilene Oliver, Christine Wilks (UK), Brad Necyk, Sean Caulfield, Scott Smallwood, Tammy Salzl, aAron Munson, Liz Ingram and Bernd Hildebrant. Several artworks have been collaborative ventures with medical and science researchers at the University of Alberta;

Selected featured works

Human in the Loop is an interactive artwork made by the A-Life Team led by Vadim Bulitko using artificial intelligence agents that evolve in response to human movement in the installation.

Sean Caulfield, Marilène Oliver, and Scott Smallwood have worked together to create a wall of images that contrast and combine anatomical representations from the Renaissance to the present day. The work will explore literature and health humanities scholar Daniel Laforest’s research into the ways medical technology and specifically diagnostic imaging are shifting the ways we perceive and understand our own bodies and life-stories. The work is also intended to comment on the growing disparity between wealthy nations or communities who have easy access to cutting-edge digital health technology, and poorer ones that do not enjoy the same readily available assets.

Brad Necyk multimedia installation and aAron Munson’s film Under the Sun address the psychological impacts of technology on the body. As we oscillate between hope and despair, we live in an epidemic of innovation and longing, forecasting – simultaneously – a golden age of utility and apocalypse. How do we navigate these contradictions? What can art reveal of our era’s collective anxiety and individual angsts?

Invited International Guest Artist Yves Netzhammer’s Soliloquies Approach Like Shy Deer installation of projection and drawings features the artist’s iconic minimalist puppets that he animates to perform surreal tasks conjuring a nostalgia for embodiment and physical vulnerability.

Marilène Oliver worked with radiology and computer science researchers to produce high-resolution full body magnetic resonance (MR) scan datasets in order to create two new art installations for DYSCORPIA, both including virtual reality components. Each work is accompanied by an original audio track created by Gary James Joynes using recordings from the original MR scan.

Digital fiction scholar Astrid Ensslin will curate a room to showcases how innovative digital, interactive and multimedia forms of creative writing may give rise to stories in flesh and bytes. Featuring the work of international artists Jason Nelson and Christine Wilks, this initiative will give the opportunity for viewers to enjoy the radical newness of the stories showcased.

Isabelle Van Grimde’s EVE2050 short film series will be presented at the centerpiece of the exhibition, for EVE2050 was the initial spark that led to DYSCORPIA. The films combine contemporary dance, video, music, visual and digital arts in order to engage in an artistic, aesthetic and ethical reflection on the future of human beings and of the body in an age of digital technology, biomedical advances, and artificial intelligence. Van Grimde will also be presenting her EVE2050 stage production in Edmonton in Fall 2019.