phoenix /danm 201 /embodiment

Week 8 Response : Embodiment

Mark Hansen's analysis of Robert Lazzarini's Skulls is an effort in mental contortionism.  As appears to be common with so much of art and culture analysis, there is a nugget of interesting ideas and perhaps truth around the peripheries of the discussion, but the rest is largely mental masturbatory nonsense (there I said it!)  It's attempts to reach something true are wrapped in philosophy that is wrapped in a fiction.  With perhaps a sense of embodied irony, it takes an effort at data mining, or perhaps knowledge mining, to find the nuggets buried in the fictions.

While I found certain things interesting, especially notions of the digital space existing in a sort of no-space, or as he likes to term it “any-space-whatever” (ASW), there is much of this work that I see as needlessly complex.  Now, I admittedly have not seen the Skulls piece in person, but I am intimately familiar with the processes by which the Skulls are produced.  I wonder if the sculptures produced were the warped bounding boxes of the 3d digital image if this would have provoked such a detailed response?  I think it is precisely that the human skull can produce a visceral response that these have such power.  It is that accessibility that creates interest, not just the digital warping of the object.  I would go so far as to say that the disturbance that a viewer experiences by these sculptures is mostly a form of cognitive dissonance; the objects are at once familiar and distinctly unfamiliar, and this creates a constant mental flip-flopping that is an attempt to reshape the images into something that is more comfortable.  Hansen's contention that the image has moved from one of immediate accessibility in the physical world to one that is produced within the mind, is interesting and has some merit.  But the mental gymnastics that he has to go through to prove his rather abstract notion of embodiment starts to challenge credulity.  It could certainly be true that I do not fully comprehend his notion embodiment, but this possibility points to the primary problem I see with this piece: It is a defiant refutation of Occam's Razor.  While the journey Hansen takes us on is roller-coaster ride with lots of interesting moments, I kept wondering if there were not simpler explanations for the experiences he was attempting to explicate.