Border Crossings Magazine

We live in a post-human age. A recent cover article in Harper’s magazine predicts that the American military will soon be robotic. Much of what we invent in the fields of science and technology are prosthetic devices that extend human capabilities. Donna J. Haraway, a distinguished feminist and cultural historian, has argued that we are all cyborgs, “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” The word “cyborg” itself is a linguistic hybridity, a slippage between cybernetic and organism, in which the thing made is neither one nor the other, but some new combination of the two.

Reva Stone, a Winnipeg artist, has been working in this interstitial zone for over a decade. Since 1992, she has used various interactive and electronic technologies to investigate what it means to be human, what vestiges of our previous being are maintained in our current selves and what nature of changes does the human organism undergo in this mutable territory.

Her most ambitious piece, called Imaginal Expression, was the centre of an exhibition shown at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2004, along with sentientBody, 1998, and Carnevale 3.0, 2000–02. Each of these works dealt with the presence and rhythms of the human body; sentientBody used electronic sensors, images of sand and water combined with the sound of a woman’s breathing, and a water-filled stainless steel container to both realize and dematerialize the existence of the body. Carnevale (the Latin name makes a direct reference to the falling away of flesh) was a life-sized aluminium figure placed on a robotic platform that used heat sensors to locate and photograph individuals in the gallery space. The captured images were either stored or replicated and then abandoned, functions that mimic the operation of human memory. In both these works, Stone was a distant presence in her disembodied breathing and in her outlined form as a robotic young girl.

In Imaginal Expression, 2004, the smallest parts of her are evident in the largest scale. She took scanned images of her own body—skin, hair, teeth—and, through a computer program, wrapped them around three-dimensional, simulated models of animated protein molecules, which were then projected onto a screen nine feet high and 48 feet long. The resulting installation was extraordinary. Your initial reaction was to think of the visual trippiness of space films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But unlike a film, which is a fixed form, everyone’s encounter with Imaginal Expression was different because the projected images were in constant and unrepeatable flux. The piece is the realization of the Heraclitean notion that you can never step twice in the same visual river. The scale and the constant metamorphizing of the panorama in front of you made it difficult to focus on any one thing for any length of time. But there is an associative inventory of possible readings of the impossible objects you see when you enter Imaginal Expression’s perceptual world. It falls as freely from the imagination as her magnified proteins move through space.

These are the things I saw: thick twists of matter that look like flesh trees; muted party favours from the New Year’s Eve celebration of a giant; building-sized clusters of capillaries, or roots, or bean sprouts; huge, soft-skinned parsnips with veins glowing menacingly below the surface; limitless pieces of octopus curling away into a space so deep you imagine yourself in another universe; phallic shapes that make you realize size doesn’t just matter, it is matter; massive white pathways that shoot across the surface like the calcified traces of meteors; mobiles of the biological forms made by the artist/zoologist, Ernest Haeckel; huge lozenges that cross-hatch and skein and weave themselves into shamanic forms, and then dissolve into something else, as does everything you’ve set your eyes on. Imaginal Expression is a world of limitless measure; it is architectural and intimate, eerie and sexy. There is something about its scale and ineluctable mutation that puts you in mind of Walt Whitman’s “procreative urge,” the world of inner space turning itself inside out in a slow, seductive turn, as if a tectonic shift were a slow-motion striptease. Put another way, it is the body of the universe techno-eroticizing itself. Put another way, it is a recasting of Descartes’s definition of being, which now becomes, “I am, therefore I morph.” Put another way. …

Robert Enright interviewed Reva Stone in Winnipeg on January 5, 2007.

BORDER CROSSINGS:   What got you interested in this kind of work in the first place?

REVA STONE:   In 1989, I was working on a piece that was critiquing children’s toys and video games, and Richard Dyck, whom I hold responsible for this whole thing, said, “Have you thought about making what you’re doing interactive?” So I did and eventually got to the point where I started pricing out what it would take to make it interactive. Then, in 1990, I applied for an Explorations grant and a Manitoba Arts Council grant and got them both. I went into panic mode because I didn’t know what to do.

BC:   Why would that suggestion from Richard have been so happily accepted in the first place?

RS:   It was simply that it involved the viewer so much more. Also that I was working with something that was room scale. The scale of the body and the body’s interaction in a simulated world were especially interesting to me.

BC:   In art school, didn’t you start out as a painter?

RS:   Yes, but it didn’t last long. To be honest, art school wasn’t that helpful in figuring out what I was really looking at, which turned out to be social convention. Basically, I was asking the question, “How do we construct our world?” It was from that perspective that I got interested in the gender of toys and in how our bodies are being changed and constructed.   (See Issue 101 to read the full interview.)