Corps Morceles


'Corps Morceles' is an interactive immersive 3-D digital video projection environment. The work employs the fragmentation of the human form to evoke the sense of fragmentation and dissociation experienced through contemporary media - especially how we, as individuals and collectives, are mediated through social and network media platforms. It has been observed that social and network (platform) media have led to the progressive fragmentation of society and cultural identity, with many people constructing their world-view, and sense of self, within insular sub-cultural echo-chambers. This is manifest in the fragmentation and polarisation of political and cultural discourse in many societies around the world. The fragmentation of collective (social) identity arguably has its correspondence in the fragmentation of individual identity - a schizoid condition marked by lack of trust in others, our shared realities and our own sense of self.

Jacqes Lacan employed the term 'corps morcele' (fragmented body, or body in pieces), to describe a subject's lack of unity and subsequent sense of anxiety and hysteria. Lacan observed that when hysterical paralysis affects a limb, it does not necessarily correspond to the physiological structure of the nervous system, but rather (re)presents the body as a fragmented 'imaginary anatomy'. Thus the fragmented body, the 'corps morcele', is "revealed at the organic level, in the lines of fragilization that define the anatomy of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria"[1]. Lacan apprehended the ego existing in a constant state of uncertainty and threat due to this impending sense of fragmentation, manifesting as "images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body" (ibid). This work, 'Corps Morceles', explores this idea as a respresentation of the shizoid and dissociated contemporary human condition.

'Corps Morceles' employs full body tracking (using the Microsoft Azure Kinect IR sensor), which calculates the physical location and attitude of 'interactor' (viewer') bodies, to create (invisible) skeletal representations of interactors in the 3D space. Live video of the interactors occupying the installation space is analysed in real-time and, through the use of colour tracking and object identification, individual body parts of interactors are captured and then mapped (rendered) to their corresponding 'skeletal' element (joints, eg: knee, elbow, head, etc) to create fragmented three dimensional images of the interactors, which are displayed singularly and collectively in the video projections around them. The captured video fragments of the interactors' bodyparts are also swapped between different joints and also between different interactors, such that one interactor may appear to have the head of another. Individual captured bodyparts are also flipped, horizontally or vertically, depending on interactor behaviour. From time to time the system displays 3-D vectors defined by the boundaries of the captured bodyparts, connecting the swapped elements, making explicit how the process is functioning and creating another level of three dimensional geometry within the work that evokes some of its organisational principles.

The projected visualisation is calculated according to a dynamic camera view. The virtual camera that defines the point of view in the work (eg: controls the position of the virtual camera in the 3-D space and the point to which it is directed) can be in one of two states. If there is only one interactor, or if interactors are standing close to one another, the camera is positioned 'outside' the virtual space, looking 'in' to the centre of the 3-D space, presenting interactors with a classic mirror-like (objective) view of the scene (eg: their position on the screen corresponds with their position in the installation). The camera's horizontal position is calculated as an average of all the interactors positions (derived from the locations of their head joints) so that as interactors move about in the space a parallax effect is generated, emphasising the three dimensional relationships between the various captured bodyparts of the interactors. Also, when there is more than one interactor, and they are not standing in proximity to one another, the mode of the camera changes, its position corresponding to the head joint position of the interactor who has been in the installation the longest and oriented (looking) towards the head of the interactor who has been in the space the second longest (a subjective, or inter-subjective, point of view). This creates a 3-D view of the scene controlled by the two interactors, further immersing the interactors in the three dimensional interactive space, emphasising the dimensionality of the enviroment and focusing interactors on their interactions with one another.

'Corps Morceles' was coded in the Processing language (version 4) on a M3 Max Macbook Pro, with the skeleton tracking coded in C# within Unity3D on an Alienware Windows laptop with NVidia graphics card. The software was written by the artist, including the video tracking and skeletal parsing algorithms. Third party libraries were used for video capture (processing.video) and network communications (hypermedia.net) between the Macbook and Windows computers.

1. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.5

CC 2024 Simon Biggs