Remote Estrangements (Reformat)
Eric Tkaczyk
2020
In a moment of global panic, uncertainty and restlessness, the body seeks refuge in the safety of the Screen. The Screen (a surface on which images are projected), serves to protect, obscure or conceal through safeguarding, masking, filtering or intercepting— a key interface of subject formation within a cybernated world.
Remote Estrangements once existed as a multimedia installation where the viewer physically engaged with projected images, sound and sculpture. In this Reformat, the site-specificity of this work has been converted to the space that exists within the Screen— a mere vessel for serving the digital body a false sense of tangibility. Snippets of my own body float in isolation within the space between the screen and the glass: one that is fragile, ephemeral and easily interrupted. In desperation for sensorial experience, the body fragments anxiously fondle the surface in order to find familiarity within their displacements.
In the social vortex of uncanny illusion, the performative nature of bodies and their photographic reproductions reinforce a notion of flesh-as-commodity within a capitalistic context. Fracture of the Self and divorce from the psyche reveal the underlying symptoms of the digital body. Through the veil of surface and transparency, the body begins to emerge anew, filtered through image and light. The resulting forms are merely fixed frames of embodiment and stand-ins for the frail and intangible subject.
