“Every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial.” – Laurence Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning

My piece “Spectrality” is a 3D model, from a 3D laser scan of Butoh performance artist Azumi Oe. It exists in the browser as a virtual sculpture, and in augmented reality as a ‘glass’ sculpture that is partially transparent. It is best seen in AR in the dark, as it glows softly and is suspended above the ground - a barely-there, digital ghost.

My work has long explored the linkage between technology and death, and the unintended emotional resonances of new modes of technological vision. I trained as a photographer, and photographers have always seen the eeriness inherent in duplicating the body and turning it into a still image. In photographic theory, there is a long history of comparing the photograph to a zombie, or a corpse… British author and artist (and founder of the art collective known as the International Necronautical Society) Tom McCarthy, citing Freud, has argued that all recording technologies are haunted by the desire to freeze time and hedge against death -- but that paradoxically, in assembling vast digital
archives, we are really building our own tombs. New modes of technological reproduction only heighten this eeriness: witness the 'uncanny valley' of
simulated humanness in 3d cinema and video games. 

My last exhibition, Dematerialized, addressed the changes that digitization and transmission bring to the body. It used the language of cemeteries (polished granite, cast stone figures) to suggest a quasi-religious aspect to the separation of body and avatar. The works began as 3D laser scans of living dancers, but the scanner I use was never designed to capture the body, and when it is faced with breath and motion, it breaks down, fracturing the human figure. These incomplete scans are then further sculpted, deleted, reduced in polygon count, and sent across the ether of digital space. With so many traces of their identity lost in the process of translation, they travel so far from their physical body that only their ghosts remain.
