BODY CODE
Body Code is an evolving interactive performance project in which the artist wears a latex suit covered with printed QR codes. For more than a decade, the work has continuously adapted to changes in the Internet. The information embedded within the work shift with each iteration, reflecting changing cultural preoccupations and what we collectively look toward, question, and desire.
Viewers are invited to scan the QR codes on the artist’s body with their smartphones. Each code redirects them to the Body Code website, where they encounter information drawn from the Internet. In its current iteration, the work turns its attention to artificial intelligence and the human body, pairing “AI” with different parts of the body—AI + brain, AI + eye, AI + muscle, AI + heart, and others.
By pairing AI with specific parts of the human body, Body Code creates a space where the physical and the computational begin to overlap. The body has always been a site of knowledge, memory, sensation, identity, and experience. AI introduces another way of seeing and interpreting it—through systems of recognition, analysis, prediction, and simulation.
For more than a decade, Body Code has explored the tension between the lived body and the information generated about it. In its current form, the project asks how that tension changes when artificial intelligence becomes an active participant in the conversation.
Ultimately, Body Code considers how our understanding of the human body changes as it enters into dialogue with technologies capable of interpreting, predicting, generating, and reimagining it. At the center of the work is a fundamental question: Where does the truth about the human body lie, and who has the authority to define it?
Body Code hasperformed internationally at museums, galleries, biennials, festivals, and public sites. This includes: the A+D Museum, Laboratoria Arte Alameda, the ZERO1 Biennial, Perform Chinatown with Charlie James Gallery, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Art Center Nabi, Creative Tech Week in New York, Women in STEAM, the 2023 Ars Electronica Festival, CONTEXT Art Fair, Art Miami, and the Exploratorium: The Museum of Science, Art & Human Perception. The work has also been performed in public spaces including Piazza Umberto in Capri, Italy; Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy; and Times Square in New York City.
