A Body Without Borders

About

A Body Without Borders

Presented in partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series, in collaboration with the Berkeley Arts and Design initiative as part of A+D Mondays @ BAMPFA.

Rhonda Holberton’s interdisciplinary art practice illuminates the politics of the corporeal body navigating through virtual space. In this presentation Holberton will discuss her recent projects utilizing networked VR designed to trigger subtle interactions of electrons between biological and digital systems, a speculative cosmetic company whose mission is focused on the potential of products to create distributed performative action, and collaborative image making with Neural Networks.

We are living through a crisis of reality. Recent elections across the globe revealed many people living in parallel, but rarely overlapping, realities. Today, ubiquitous screens mediate bodily experiences of the physical world. In turn, we are beginning to see digital content shaping material reality. Technologies to deliver Augmented & Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become as common as smartphones are itoday. At the same time, the material environment and physical bodies living within it are approaching a critical moment of climate-induced destabilization that can only be mitigated by collective action. If VR can create a situation in which the user's entire environment is determined by the creators of the virtual world, then it is imperative that the creators of digital worlds take into account the collective needs of the physical one.

The solutions to existential problems must come from existential analysis. Broadly speaking, the fields of design and engineering are really good at solving problems. These disciplines are rooted in the figuring out of ‘Can we’ and ‘How to.’ Great engineers can anticipate the ways a project could fail technically. Art on the other hand, is particularly good at asking questions; addressing what if rather than how to. Questions like; Should we? What are…