Thwarted Movement of Body in Media Art, between Defiguration and Embodiment

Abstract

This study examines the characteristics of mechanical images as representatives of media art that models artistic body, to examine where the experiment between ‘defiguration’ of technical reproduction and ‘embodiment’ of media work is headed. The purpose of this study is ultimately to expand the trend of modern media art and its discursive possibilities across the humanities and technologies. But as a start, I will focus on the existing connections between the body art and media art and move on to the relationship between humans and new media/machine. Today’s media studies involves much of technology discourse, rewriting cultural manifesto for the age of artificial intelligence. The information discourse in this age of A.I. requires an understanding of media that represent the intelligence itself beyond being just the tools. Through this, this study will examine what kind of body media art, which explores the communication method between the medium and the body, embodies in what kind of world. It will be comparable to the cloud of Phantasmagoria, which has always succeeded in deluding in the crossroad of technology and art. In short, employing Deleuze's concept of a machinic phylum, I will argue that media art conduct experiments on the coexistence and intersection of new species/existences, above human beings, machine, and nature. Defiguration refers to forms that are not the identical organ belonging to human/nature, and the newly created body cannot be constrained to the same plane of gravity. The media – as – nature such as clouds represent the free movement of human in media, made from defiguration and embodiment.