May - June 2020
Screening of Virtual Version
A room within which a computer can control the existence of matter.
Rowena Harris
This film version is designed for viewing at home.
It is interactive, please engage as you feel.
Conventionally, if this is a press release I should begin ‘the gallery presents’ and then write in the third person, that or these would be commissioned words from a writer or curator alongside. Such was the case when I first presented this online film [1] in 2017 - the times are very different now. Covid19 has broken convention in contemporary art, and it has made me reflect again on this work in particular. Not only for its intended virtual design - that which we all grapple to bring forward to go on - but, as I can see now with greater clarity, for what I was trying to say.
This film is about illness. It is about invisibility. It is about the health of one’s body in dialogue with digitality. It is, as the title suggests, about a figure that is isolated within a room [2] - before we all became familiar with the phrase and experience of self-isolation. I do not think this film is an able-bodied perspective - or at least not entirely, as my later work has made clear to me that dis and ability define each other. Although I may not have been able to reach this clarity at the time, this film is in grappling towards understanding invisible disability and the stakes for this in everyday virtual experience.
Covid19 has announced invisible disability via highlighting those with certain underlying chronic illnesses - those of our friends and family, people that must be shielded and are absent from these quiet streets, and people we may not have expected at all because none of this can be seen. More broad than the vulnerable person list,[3] invisible disability refers to non-apparent illnesses, impairments, challenges, as well as neurological differences - the latter includes neurodiversity, which is not of disability but difference and spectral plurality against that normative/other binary. Invisible disabilities are now a visible point on the collective radar, and there were always people who knew what longterm self-isolation means, there were always people that struggled with the physicality of work, there were always people that knew what an illness like corona feels like in a constant way, there were always people that lent on virtuality as means to get by, and there were always people that managed this without anyone noticing at all….what will we do with this new visible point?
It is too easy to think that new technology and the ongoing explosion of virtual modes will create an equal ground for able and disabled alike. Since the arrival of the internet the socio-economic disparity between able and disabled has only grown.[4] It is a myth that our bodies and minds [5] are separate - its a myth we know, especially in art. And yet given a flat screen, and a virtual world in which to work, it seems we still separate and speak only of mind, leaving thoughts of the body restrained to the physical seat. Any notion of rupture between body and mind has been long since cast aside by corporations gleaning profits through surveillance capitalism - we certainly conceived of this before covid [6] - and yet in this new physical/virtual rupture we seemed to have arrived back to the naivety of the very early internet - too thankful for its utopian promise, and of the real benefit to society new technology brings, to challenge the troubling parts underneath. We have already learnt not take the web as seen, and in this state of turmoil we maybe forgetting what is still at stake. If we don't confuse the bodymind union for this new physical/virtual division - then maybe we can think, and discuss, and critique as contemporary art does, what is at stake for bodyminds of our invisible disability communities, that insistently bleep on our collective radar in these times, and for whatever new order will unfold - which seems it can only be more, not less, virtual amplification as a result in our lives.
This film is also about virtual phantom limb therapy; the adaptability of one’s mental body image and felt experience;[7] and early virtual reality experiments, which sought to push how far ones body could extend into virtual worlds and alien forms, and of how real that could feel.[8] The interactive questions you will be answering are drawn from their real questionaries. In current reflection for me now, the areas of research I covered may have been the results of trying to make the invisible visible. What is not included in this film, but I want to leave as a lingering question - a question that I continue to probe through recent and ongoing work - how do we create visibility to see ableism at work in the virtual worlds we inhabit?
Rowena x
Film Credits
Cinematography: Orestis Lambrou
Actress, location: Emma Hunt
Music, Audio, FX, Edit: the artist
With Thanks to: WIREWAX
1- I first made this film specifically for online viewing (and later for physical screening) in 2017 - for a project curated by James Irwin, with a text by artist and writer Nicolas O’Brien, and I continue to be informed by the conversations we had.
2 - The film title is a quote by Ivan Sutherland, 1965 - creator of the first virtual reality machine.
3 - In the UK at least, vulnerable people are falling through holes and left without support, as a result of the mismanagement of this list. I can attest to this issue attempting to help my very elderly and ill Grandmother, who to this day is still not on the list though she should be – Frances Ryan, Disabled people left off coronavirus vulnerable list The Guardian, 27 April 2020 [accessed 28 April 2020]
4 - Following the social model of disability, which says that it's society that creates the barriers to access and equality that people with disabilities experience, rather than the disability itself, then it is the architecture of the internet, its logics, culture and social constraints that exclude disabled people from full participation - Aleks, Krotoski, What Effect Has the Internet Had on Disability? The Guardian, 6 March 2011 [accessed 28 April 2020]
5 - Bodymind in specific terms for dis/ability: “...processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of a physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases”
– Sami, Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018.
6 - “…facing the near future as digital media and computational technologies, neoliberalism, and biopolitics continue to reach into the ontological grounds of human subjectivity and sociality, both in their operating on nonconscious, bodily responses or affect and in their flooding the domain of connectivity with other-than-human agencies or datafiction.” p.ix – Patricia Clough, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
7 - Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies Routledge, 1995.
8 - Ben Delaney, Virtual Reality 1.0. The 90’s: The Birth of VR, in the Pages of CyberEdge Journal Movement Publishing, 2017.