[-empyre-] Virtual embodiment made of meat

[simon]

Dear <<empyre>> and guests,

Johannes, I appreciated very much your retracing of the funereal steps 
at the ancestral place. Could it ever replace the bodily practice? 
What's the good in asking the question? But there is little doubt that 
it depends on it and augments it.

By virtually a coincidence - its virtue in prolepsis - or at least 
inkling at a thought that is yet to be - practical considerations of the 
research group with which I am involved, Minus Theatre, are keeping up 
with this discussion and following its thread, hanging off, and being 
extended by it. But with due respect hardly in the same technical frame 
of televisual - telenomic? - representation or coded virtue, they 
descend from virtual bodily crisis. Disease, the death process and 
agonies are available as virtually embodied in art. They are expensively 
so in the work of Francis Bacon. We are concerned with these embodiments 
for the flesh-fall rather than the flesh-lift - to mistranslate the 
chair-lift referred to -, with the meati-ness of the virtual within 
them, rather than its face or interface, or technological facade, or 
digital interface, or sexy face of those tools with which and of which 
in their acquisition and promotion - of having them 'at their disposal' 
- educational institutions like to reward themselves.

I am not adding anything but am in all likelihood engaged in just the 
kind of prat-fall in full view Johannes has called slapstick - however, 
I wonder about the embodiment of slapstick, or, more directly, its 
incarnation, because, after all, the meat feels as it falls off the 
chair-lift. The virtual is here too, isn't it?

It's enough for me to tell you I feel and a taste of the differend leaks 
through the interface.

Not so much this is significant for us at this juncture but something 
like - the resort to another degree of abstraction which will no doubt 
ever succeed in not going far enough - wondering about this particular 
virtual critical embodiment in, say, an art of figural painting: how to 
embody it?

We, in our work so far, have part-wise achieved a theatrical language of 
many natural languages - Korean, Mandarin, English, Russian - including 
the natural political of time-images in live embodied theatre. But I 
feel there is a beyond and that is found in the virtual embodiment of a 
crisis which is brought to us in art.

Best,
Simon Taylor

www.squarewhiteworld.com