The Density Fields in Viscous Bodies research project explores the human body as a new ecology of densities. The dissolution of the body’s anatomical boundaries allows the reconsideration and recreation of it as a new physical territory in constant flux and change. It questions the common representations of the body in the digital realm as a series of surfaces and layers, and creates a potentially new status where the modulation of the body’s inner and outer surfaces becomes irrelevant. By using advanced medical visualisation techniques as both method and tool to redesign the body with variable intensities of matter, the obsolete notion of a finite body is exposed in favour of a new type of body-space that is, above all, a viscous field of variable concentrations of mass and matter. The project is sited within the seamless transitional fluctuation of a real/virtual body, an extended and projected body, where the traditional dichotomy between inner and outer space is dissolved. It aims on various levels to establish an understanding of soft mouldable space in a computational, rational as well as a poetic sense. Soft immortality derives from non-euclidian spaces and dependancies, densities rather than point geometries and rational triangulated realities.
The installation ‘Soft Immortality’, takes slices of a full-body human MRI scan and uses them to invest a newly created structure with viscous properties. Space, here, is generated as an inherited property of density; it dissolves boundaries in favor of a state of flux. Objects of varying densities are allowed to interact with each-other: solid, semi-opaque, organ-like ‘syncretic transplants’ are suspended amongst transparent slices, themselves both single objects and part of a greater whole. The choreography of light through the subtly kinetic installation creates permutations determined by density, translucency and reflection. The body’s densities are imaged, digitized, manipulated, projected and re-imagined. There is tentative four-dimensional representation: a simulacrum.
Author: Tobias Klein
