Virtual Bodies: Kris Verdonck’s Virtual-Machine and Samuel Beckett’s Memory-Machine
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Considering how the pandemized world exacerbates the dialectic between the body as the material condition of existence and the desire to overcome its physical limitations, a dialectic evoked by virtuality as a renewed condition of our lives, this paper examines the anxiety over the matter of the body by tracing a genealogy of ghosts retroactively from Kris Verdonck’s new media performance back to Samuel Beckett’s “bodily” theatre. Seemingly designed in different ways from each other, the virtual bodies from both artists awaken the audience to the analogy between cyberspace and theatre as a sensible encounter in which ambiguities of theatrical presences are maneuvered and exploited. If Verdonck’s hologrammed doll seems “uncannily life-like” without the corporeal body within its theatrical frame, the bodies of daughters in Beckett’s late plays are deliberately rendered indistinct to “make presence strange and ambiguous.” Proving the liveness of the virtual body or virtualizing the body on the stage to prove the presence of the past in the present that is “not quite there,” Verdonck’s virtual machine and Beckett’s memory machine attest to a crisis of the subject that may lead to an encounter with the other. Envisioning their bodies as sites in which the past, the present, and the future are intersected with each other and inanimate objects and forces around them are crossed with each other, the analog virtual bodies on Beckett’s stage anticipate Verdonck’s digital one that is suspended between the body and its projection, the subject and the object, and the human and the matter.
Abstract
Considering how the pandemized world exacerbates the dialectic between the body as the material condition of existence and the desire to overcome its physical limitations, a dialectic evoked by virtuality as a renewed condition of our lives, this paper examines the anxiety over the matter of the body by tracing a genealogy of ghosts retroactively from Kris Verdonck’s new media performance back to Samuel Beckett’s “bodily” theatre. Seemingly designed in different ways from each other, the virtual bodies from both artists awaken the audience to the analogy between cyberspace and theatre as a sensible encounter in which ambiguities of theatrical presences are maneuvered and exploited. If Verdonck’s hologrammed doll seems “uncannily life-like” without the corporeal body within its theatrical frame, the bodies of daughters in Beckett’s late plays are deliberately rendered indistinct to “make presence strange and ambiguous.” Proving the liveness of the virtual body or virtualizing the body on the stage to prove the presence of the past in the present that is “not quite there,” Verdonck’s virtual machine and Beckett’s memory machine attest to a crisis of the subject that may lead to an encounter with the other. Envisioning their bodies as sites in which the past, the present, and the future are intersected with each other and inanimate objects and forces around them are crossed with each other, the analog virtual bodies on Beckett’s stage anticipate Verdonck’s digital one that is suspended between the body and its projection, the subject and the object, and the human and the matter.
참고문헌 (21)
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