Digital Body Automata

Digital Body Automata explores the idea that the human body has changed to incorporate virtual (digital), organic (material) and mechanical (artificial) concepts. The artwork is a plea to allow for both a fusion and an emergence of these concepts, which include the unpredictable, wet, sensual and biological organic fluid of the human sensorium, and at the same time to remain conscious of the ethical implications of human manipulation.

The resultant Interactive Documentation traces the complexities, metaphors, critical discourses and evidences of these conceptual changes in the disciplines of philosophy, science, technology, popular culture and media art, and formulates a set of paradigms which capture these changes. It then focuses on the value of large-scale hybrid art environments to reflect and interpret these visual representations, semantics and symbolic concepts. This includes the transformation of the somatic and interactive roles of the viewer and the invention of new interfaces, which include multiple choices and offer new spatial/temporal perspectives.

A large part of this construction was completed in October 1997 at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Therefore, the Interactive Documentation can also be seen as an analysis and synthesis of this hybrid environment.

Jill Scott 1999