In February (1997) Eva Wohlgemuth went to Cyberware in Monterey, California, in order to map her body. She became a simple 35mb file and was one of the first artists to undertake such a process. In Bodyscan: Instandstillness (1997 -2005) Wohlgemuth generates herself as a number of visually striking artificial beings. By recording the coordinates of 285,000 points on her body she reproduces herself as a digital data object, she can exist on a disk or in the internet as cartographic body scan.
Wohlgemuth sees the body primarily as a three-dimensional, topographical structure. In Bodyscan: Instandstillness she examines the influences and parameters which determine the body, asking if mapping herself is a conjuring of identity or a possibility of socially integrated re-mapping? This will be the first UK exhibition of her work. “The smallest text file of me is 1MB, so I fit on a disk; you can just about recognise ME as a wireframe, but when it’s rendered there can be no doubt, IT IS ME! So, am I more than just my dataset — as we always assumed — or has my dataset become an essential requirement for me to assert my position in cyberspace?”
Wohlgemuth trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (1979), and was a teacher in Austrian high schools for ten years. Her interest in electronic networks grew out of her System work, exhibited widely and presented at Documenta X. She lives and works in Vienna. www.evawohlgemuth.com/BODYSCAN/ Picture Credit: Eva Wohlgemuth, Body Scan: Instandstillness, 1997 – 2005