Associação Cultural Videobrasil

On Marcia Vaitsman, "The One Made of Light Stuff"

One of the most impressive features of Marcia Vaitsman's ongoing project The one made of light stuff is her unique involvement in the subject of the skin. The work will use the image of human skin as a kind of interface, through which the viewer can explore various different stories behind it. More precisely, you are supposed to 'touch' some parts of the skin displayed on the panel, in order to step farther into her work. Scars you will find on the skin give you a clue about where you should touch.

The skin image in her work look very realistic, but at the same time, it is something that you would never find in this real world. The image is made by joining together photos of the skin from different part of the body of different people. So, in a way, it is the image of a collective skin, which does not belong to any particular part of any particular person. It is as if the skin had acquired its own life, by means of digital image processing. The skin extends itself like an unknown, living landscape in which you can move around.

Let's think a little bit about what the skin is. The Skin is not just a surface of our body. Its function is not only that of wrapping or protection. When you take a microscopic view on the skin, you will find an astonishing landscape totally different from that you see everyday. The skin is not two-dimensional, but totally complex living structure, which allows exchange of various matters, energy and information between the body and the environment. So, from scientific point of view, we will understand how dynamic the skin works. Its function can be called paradoxical, because the skin separates and connects two things at the same time, i.e. the inside and the outside, the self and the outer world. Already in our real world, the skin works as an interface between the living organism and the environment around it.

Only when an organism dies, the skin turns into a mere surface covering the inner part of the body, like an artificial skin of a doll. So, you can say it is the dynamic function of the skin as the interface, which mediates the inside and the outside, that distinguish life and death. The skin in Marcia's work is of course not a real skin but the image processed using the computer, and displayed on a flat touch screen. However, it is not a simple surface. The skin regains its life in the form of interactive relationship between the work and the viewer.

In this context, it is crucially important that the artist refers to "Human Museum in Helsinki" in this work. Museums as we know are normally supposed to contain objects, which are already 'dead' in the sense that they have been -- whether they are artworks, historical items, or scientific specimens -- removed from their original context in the particular time and place, and exhibited in a abstract space, in a showcase in a museum, placed just like a dead body in a coffin. (Theodor W.Adorno once mentioned in an essay* a tonal association between 'Museum' and 'Mausoleum.') Exactly because they are 'dead,' they can be safely purchased, collected, owned, studied, and evaluated. *Theodor W. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum", in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 1955.

In this imaginary "Human Museum," however, it is human beings, instead of dead objects, that are displayed to the audience. It contains living 'exhibits' from thirty different ethnic groups. You can see, for example, a native Amazon woman, or, maybe an old White European man, and touch their hair or their skin, to see how they feel. This situation deconstructs the very idea of the museum, because there is no 'safe' distance between the viewer and the viewed, the object and the subject. It will tell us that our conventional idea of the museum has been based on a fictional, asymmetrical relation between the two. One side(objects) should be dead and the other side(viewers) alive -- this is the necessary condition for the experience to appreciate works in the normal way in a museum.

More important and interesting features about Human Museum is that the audience are invited to touch the 'exhibits' in the former, while they are usually not allowed to do so in real museums. You would be warned even when you come a little too close to a painting. 'Touching' is a taboo in our normal way to appreciate art works in the museum, because it could cause a change in them. But touching can never be a one-way action. When you touch something, it means you are touched by it. Just imagine how it would be if you touch the heir of a living person in Human Museum. You couldn't possibly persuade yourself that you are only appreciating an exhibit in a museum. You would immediately feel that you are being touched at the same time.

Touching a scar, even if it is a scar displayed in the screen, would make you feel as if you were doing the same thing in reality. The image of scars is so powerful. Scars are the trace of time accumulated on a body, and by touching a scar you can try to listen to the voice of the body. By doing so, you are touched by the scar as well. In your action of touching it, the scar is listening to your inner voice, too. A number of stories, memories and dreams you will experience in the work of Marcia Vaitsman seem to suggest what these voices coming from deeper place in the body talk. So, scars are not a flaw on the body which people wish to keep perfect, but an important sign leading us to a more profound experience of our body and mind.

So-called 'interactive media art' has often been supposed to be new because it make use of digital media for artistic expression. I think this is a serious misunderstanding. Newness of media art and newness of technology are not same. However new technology a work uses, it can still be very old as a work of art. If a work of media art is understood in the same context as that of the conventional art, i.e. created as an art object, exhibited in the museum and appreciated as a masterpiece and so on, there would not be much to say about the new, unique character of media art. Interactive media art can only be new, when it attempts to create a new territory of artistic experience.

Now, more than a decade after the period of rapidly spreading Internet, of computer culture and of booming media art in early 1990s, media art seems to be confronted with the question: how can we create a really new artistic experience using digital media? What exactly is unique and new in media art, apart from newness of technology? Perhaps these questions should more seriously be asked in technologically highly advanced nations, like US or Japan. I think this is part of the reason why Marcia Vaitsman was invited as an artist in residence in spring 2004, to Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Gifu, one of the leading media art schools in Japan. (ref. http://www.iamas.ac.jp/)