Pharmakon: From Body to Being
Abstract
This thesis dossier is separated into the following distinct sections: an extended artist statement; a portfolio documenting artworks made during my MFA candidacy and my exhibit Pharmakon: Acts, Traces, and Maps; and a case study of artist Tony Oursler, whose video and multimedia installations explore the psychological and social relationships between individuals and technologies. Together, they present my exploration of the body’s ‘power of acting,’ or potentia agendi, in relation to the modificatory capacity of technology, or affectus, on the human body. In particular, I investigate the body’s habits, or capacity for habit-building, what Bourdieu calls habitus, and the interconnection between the body and its digital environment, digitus habitus. My installations are built around photographic and video media with which I designed interfaces to allow audience members to engage directly with the disruptive and entropic effects of digital technologies, ranging from cellphone displays to spam, and view the development of so-called digital personas, part of my catalogue of tech-inspired gestures, habits, and faces. The political consequences of the influence of technology are explored in the context of developing resistance to the panoptical interface of technology, a process of mass surveillance and data-harvesting which defines our contemporary relationship with technology. I term pharmakonic those gestures, or technologies, which can offer both further disruption and an opportunity for recircuit, in which the socio-mechanical agency of the body is rewired away from the addictive, decay-driven habits of digital technology towards positive, "negenthropic" habits.