At first glance, the spatial layout of Relocating the Remains would seem no more than an opportune vehicle for Piper to archive the impressive array of his artistic production. The three “virtual" rooms each house works corresponding to his three main areas of interest: the cultural imaging of the black body, the legacy of colonialism, and the racial politics of contemporary technology. Yet, doubling this homogenizing spatial division is a heterogenizing temporal logic that restructures the interrelations between works in order to foreground Piper's trajectory toward a multivalent mode of address. Following this logic, the three virtual rooms—Unmapped, Unrecorded, and Unclassified (organized from left to right)—might be thought of as designating distinct phases or levels of generality in Piper's effort to complexify his broadly Foucauldian racial politics.xxiii
Devoted to manifesting the multiple contradictions attaching to the cultural image of the black body (specifically, the black male body), Unmapped cites and mediates the most prominent area of the artist's interest from the mid '80s until the early '90s. Incorporating previous works, including The Body Politic (1983), with new material and a new interface entitled "Negrophilia"(encompassing spaces devoted to the "sight," "sound," and "feel" of the Negro), Unmapped charts the course leading from Piper's initial confrontations with black stereotypes (themselves much nuanced by the addition of animation and especially sound) to his later complex engagement with the paradoxical figure of the black athlete.
As a whole, this archive overwhelms the spectator with the irresistibility of the commodified image of the black male. Indeed, as something like a synecdoche for the entirety of this line of exploration, the image of the black athlete brings to a head the oversaturation that, as Mercer insightfully points out, is crucial to the efficacy of the stereotyped image. It is not simply that too much meaning is packed into the image, but rather that visibility has been thoroughly co-opted as a viable category of resistance: "The paradox is that the hypervisibility of black sportsmen like U.S. basketball star Michael Jordan perpetuates the spectacular otherness on which colonial fantasy turns, only this time in the service of multicultural commodity fetishism" (58).xxiv
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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