At the basis of Bernadette Wegenstein's conception, is the idea of the body as mediation. A body that is both aware of its own characteristics/shape/image, and of its being 'focusing screen' of the world. Both conditions, though, require the idea of a lived body, a dynamic structure we actually inhabit like a world. A world that is also the idea of our world as perceived by somebody's screen/gaze.
But if certainly mediation is done through an Outside-in/Inside-out structure, it is as well a random oscillation between a unifying, holistic perspective and a shattered, focused and fragmented idea of the body.
How this duality affects image-making? What's the tension within the realm of holistic/fragmented imagemaking? Is it also an analog vs digital tension?
In a medium such as film, images just appear. Light impresses, and processing makes bodies emerge from film. Is it a whole? Can we dismantle and find coherent units in it? It's hard to do, because the film is impressed by bodies that never get close. Once we try to focus, separate, enlarge, the body just fades, becomes unintelligible. We cannot physically go beyond it and see/experience a world that lies behind it, because it's just there, final.
The zoom of the material analysis doesn't show us a body behind the body. It just blurs the analog body, while shatters the digital one.
If we go deep into the digital body, we found it sliced under a grid, and every portion carries its own value, and potential.
This potential is the idea of reconstructing a whole through the harmony of an ensemble, the single parts. Every pixel is just a value, into a bigger array/system/choir.
In this sense, digital body goes beyond and perhaps is more surprising than analog body; it appears, too but it's a synthesis, a real choir, in which we have the chance of distinguish each voice. Its embodiment is then a manifestation. As the analog body, it talks to the world and through it, it carries preconceived meanings and determined values, but without actually being there.
Should these considerations affect the way we use a certain idea of body (analog/digital), and make aesthetic decisions?
A tangent, extemporary, example/consideration (still trying to know why it came in to my mind, probably because winter's approaching...): could now the good old Hilltop commercial be considered a conceptual hybridation between digital (everyone singing with his/her/its own value) and analog?
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