Overview

Decodification of The Body is a collaborative project by the artists Farhad Bahram, Brian Gillis, and Chelsea Thompto. This work stems from a conversation between the artists around issues of identity, perception, cultural alterity, and social affect.

Decodification of The Body centers the use of contemporary and emerging technologies to transform the determined correlation between the object of the body and its subjective reflection. These three artists, a trans woman, a Jewish man, and a Muslim man, explore the possibilities for decodifying the self as a subjective mechanism that is shaped by a series of immediate struggles, both in and outside of the body, which eventually presents the inability of the self to fully express its rightful image to others.

The work portrays a similar arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended schema of the self and the unintentionally expressed image of it through a conglomeration of first and third-person expressions of identity, which may or may not be tied to a physical body, socio-cultural context, and/or the impact of perceptual biases of individuals and groups. By providing windows into lived, implied, and perceived experience, this project offers the opportunity for one body to consider the limits of its own knowledge about others and scales for appraising the body as an unplanned realization that is not fixed or predetermined by its nature.

Decodification of The Body was made using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on Glitch and uses A-Frame to create the 3D/VR space. This project was initiated as a performative talk given at CAA 2021 before evolving into this 3D/VR artwork. The 3D/VR debuted in 2021 at the ADD + ART conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Instructions:

The virtual body you inhabit at the link below, can be traversed using the WASD controls:

W (forward)
A (left)
S (backward)
D (right)

or by using the directional arrows on your keyboard. Your mouse or track-pad can be used to look around by clicking and dragging. Navigate around the space to access testimonials about the lived experiences and identity of others. Feel free to investigate objects and explore the edges of the space.

NOTE: If you have VR equipment available to you, the space can be rendered in VR using the VR button in the button right-hand corner of the screen.

Links

Live Site:
https://decodification-of-body.glitch.me/

Code Repository:
https://glitch.com/edit/#!/decodification-of-body?path=index.html%3A1%3A0

Additional Documentation

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For additional documentation and/or information about this project, please feel free to contact me at:
[email protected]