Portable Body-knowledge

Sergio Valenzuela
2014, Performance - Installation
The performance-installation explores the sharing of methods and tools as portable knowledge. The main topics examined are body and text: each in relation to art and science, and also as a metaphor of the body as a book-object. The theoretical background at the core of the project is a dialogue between cognition, performance studies and body art.
The exhibition invites the audience to experience the body as a type of knowledge. Through scanning inscriptions on the artist’s skin, the audience creates a collage of information, echoing the laboratory rituals of scientists extracting information from samples. The printouts are portable, shareable and deliverable ‘body copies’ that can be read aloud, posted on a wall or left on the gallery floor.
The exhibition also presents micrographs of the printed skin and a book on the body containing 100 close-ups but no text. Lastly, to experience the process on the micro level and as a comparison of the scanner copying the live performance, there is a video of a microscope going through the surface of the printed skin.

Diploma Exhibition:

Exhibition centre Heiligenkreuzer Hof, EG Sala Terrena, 1010 Vienna

16 to 27 June 2014

from 10:00 to 18:00

Diploma Commission:

o. Univ.-Prof. Mag. rer. Nat. Dr. techn. Georg Glaeser

Sen.Lect. Dr. Bernd Kräftner

Univ.-Prof. Mag. art. Ruth Schnell

Univ.-Prof. Virgil Widrich