Inside Out Bodies

BACKGROUND Hal Foster spoke of the return of the real in the 1990s and a focus on materiality and the body. It is my position that twenty years later in 2016 we see the return to the body, but unlike the 1990s' 'abject art' the contemporary media environment has amplified an awareness of our own bodily abjection. The explosion of the current contemporary media sphere and our relationship to technology puts the corporeal body back onto the cultural radar where we are often confronted with the aesthetic opposite of our digital, mediated reality and forced to re-familiarize ourselves with our own biological corporeality. In direct contrast to the digital screen and technology's perfection, speed, rationality, we reminded our bodies remain primitive, irrational, messy and most of all abject. CONTRIBUTION I have identified a critical gap in this field which my various video works under the name 'inside out bodies' attempted to bring to light. The video works included in the exhibition combine the messy, corporeal aspects of our bodies with various technological media which attempt to highlight and arrive at an aesthetic fusion of a digital-visceral, bodily aesthetic. The work contributes to the discourse on the body in relation to contemporary media art by bringing attention to the eradication of the visceral, abject body from media art SIGNIFICANCE My work was included in this international exhibition at Ionian Academy in Corfu, Greece. The exhibition took place in a former asylum, this location resonated extremely well with the numerous video works screened in a former psychiatric ward, a highly charged and unique location that was seen by a large international audience of artists, curators, academics. The 10th AudioVisual Festival of Corfu has a high international profile. Also included in the exhibition this year was high profile artist Stelarc. As a direct result of this exhibition I have been invited to participate in a workshop/exhibition in Cyprus in 2017