Ghosts in the Machine
The installation, Ghosts in the Machine, by Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, provides an important site for working out the dichotomy between virtuality and corporeality. Far from an imagined bodiless experience once celebrated as virtual reality, Ghosts in the Machine explores the ways by which the sensing body can now become technological in order to produce an amplified, connected, and expanded corporeality. The artwork looks at the subject making potential of segmented and manipulated sensory regimes. According to the artists, our bodies do not allow us to escape from pervasive technological mediation –- as Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan pointed out they are in fact mediating apparatus, without which we would have no knowledge of the world we occupy.
Ghosts in the Machine shows us that the organization of selves and sensory data has a lineage that goes beyond the domain of art. It questions the physical and emotional aspects of our current engagements with technologies. Aesthetic examples like this locate how isolated bodies are interacting with technologies, and provide a site for observing these interactions. Thus the installation, while providing a context for the techno-human interface, also reflects on embodied experiences in an always increasing technologicalized world. Far from the imagined bodiless existence once celebrated as “virtual reality,” this art explores the modes by which sensing bodies can now become technological to produce an amplified, connected, expanded but also renegotiated corporeality which produces a new sensorium.
Instructor, School of Critical and Creative Studies
Alberta College of Art and Design
Gerry Kisil is an artist, administrator, and media arts scholar. His creative practice and scholarly interests explore issues around the role of media in the construction of environments and identity. He has exhibited his single-channel videotapes and multi-channel video installations across Canada and throughout the world. His artwork has been included in historically important Canadian media arts exhibitions and events and is contained in numerous collections and archives. He is an instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada, where he teaches and has taught media-based academic and studio classes. His essays have been published in exhibition catalogues and art journals nationally and internationally. As an arts administrator Gerry has worked in media arts facilities and art galleries in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Calgary. He is also a founding member of Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg.
