What this invitation facilitated can be gauged from the documentation video on Lozano-Hemmer's Website (http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/video/bodymovies.html), which features various games involving disparity of scale and, interestingly enough, wholly unrelated to the prepackaged images highlighted by the various shadows at play. This hints at the work's success at guiding participants away from simple mimetic identification with the body image and toward creative play with their disembodied shadows in this new space of indivision. An experience is thereby facilitated that is entirely unprecedented; in the words of one Dutch participant, there is a possibility for “a strange kind of communication with people you've never met," one where “you're all together but you're also separate" (interview from the video cited earlier).
Creating the possibility for such communion—for a truly impersonal communication or, better (following Walter Benjamin), for the "communicability" that underlies and facilitates communication—is the ultimate aim, and the ultimate accomplishment, of Lozano-Hemmer's relational aesthetic. What is truly inspiring about his work is the way that it facilitates communion: namely, through the use of the most advanced configuration of technics and embodiment imaginable, one in which technics is treated as an originary dimension of embodiment and embodiment is understood to be a creation of bodily performance of and through information.
"Computers can communicate very efficiently; but they can't engage in communion," notes Candian theater director Robert Lapage. Explaining his own preference for catalyzing “collective experiences rather than using individual interfaces for solitary participation," Lozano-Hemmer reaffirms Lepage's affirmation of communion. For Lozano-Hemmer, what is crucial “is people meeting and sharing an experience," people coming together," and indeed, “coming together in the flesh." If the contemporary phase of our (human) technogenesis makes such physical communion increasingly difficult, it simultaneously opens more radical possibilities for communion. As Lozano-Hemmer's work perfectly illustrates, such possibilities stem from our investment in technics as a means for overcoming the atomic isolation of the body. They give us a chance to live the “indivision"” of body, its immanence to the flesh of the world.
BODIES IN CODE
102