A Research Project supported by RECHERCHE Förderung, Fonds Darstellende Künste/ Neu Start Kultur

The frenetic digitalisation of our bodies and experiences during the pandemic, which we still maintain as a current inherited practice, responded as an act of overcoming death, the organicity of the body, and illness. The search for a replacement of the living body through digital and interactive technologies, expanded and normalised in all spheres of human life.

There is a primitive concern that exists in human beings to transcend with the help of technologies, that for example have been intensely developed on the Trasnhumanism movement during the last decades. However, with the pandemic we all suddenly started to translate our lives experiences through mediated/tecnhical forms; the desire to extend or translate the -corporeal- through a practice that goes, from zoomed-in encounters to the wish to approach other mediated forms of encounter in all the layers of our lives, has been normalised and keep it until actual days

The fast digitalisation, as a translation of our physical reality, could easily direct us to the annulment of all our Rituals and embodied experiences, -of life and death- and many other important ephemeral moments of our own existence. Death on the ” avatar world” , is presented as a limitation of the capacities of the self, which has no place or space in a experience dominated by algorithms, information and mediated interactions.

Before to start to use the video camera, as a practical exploration of how a digital body expression performs as reproduction (copy) and form of transcends from itself, it was necessary for me to begin to differentiate, the existence and latent presence of two types of bodies: the Organic Body- it means living body, and the Digital Body, the one that is mediated. The Organic Body resists digital reproduction and mediation; It’s full of fluids, water and blood. It connects with other living organisms and tries to feed and merge with them. The Digital Body is an alter ego and a body without imperfections; it come to life in the framed scenarios and in the actions that they perform. They are almost always homogeneous as well, as they have a premeditated and controlled representation form itself.

∞primitives concerns about transcendence

The video research attempted to merge these two bodies, seeking to rescue what was essential in each of them. It was clear that in the search for the expression of the Ritual through what was represented in the camera, should be a body that could “be” and “perform” with its own organic content and by itself.  In this concern a very concrete idea emerged: the digital representation of my daughter’s body should then be the body for digital actions; she would be the performance in which I transcended my own body and my death, and which, through the mediation with the camera, would become a reproduction and creation of moments for eternity and expansion.

In these audiovisual exercises the Ritual revealed itself digitally in the intimate moments of communion with a concrete space and environment, and in the surprise, transformation and fascination of a nomadic everyday life journey. With a fixed camera, observant and descriptive of the space and actions, I tried to remain incarnated through my view on my daughter, and to seek in these moments my own way to – digitally- transcend to eternity.

The video material ∞primitive concerns about transcendence, and the performance research compiled on WILDE FROST will be presented to the public on Saturday 17th December at @CordilleraBerlin