Cuerpos
Digitalizados

Cateogory: Performative Event
Artists: Pablo Zamorano, Joaquín Díaz Durán
Curated by: issues! Office
Location: La Hipoteca, Madrid (Spain)
Date: 27 February 2020
Photography: Leonor Martín Taibo

What if we were to become the device?

The event Cuerpos Digitalizados (in English, “Digitalised Bodies”), held on February 27, 2020 at La Hipoteca, was for many of the more than 80 attendees, the last cultural meeting that was shared with other other corpuses in the same physical space before the confinement decreed as a result of the sanitary crisis of COVID-19.

The research group issues!, promoted the meeting as an exercise in self-reflection on leisure “dispositifs” in solitude, through a performance work developed by Pablo Zamorano and Joaquín Díaz Durán. The event arose out of a year long previous investigation of the corporal implications of the leisure practices we so readily adopt in contemporary cities. We are used to a type of passive connection, mediated by devices with which we interact through screens. Leisure is offered to us through virtual experiences, which we consume, in most cases, through the safe distance offered by the screens. The performance investigated our world that is so connected, hyperconnected, but by stimuli and data, and not by our bodies; a topic that went on to become all the more opportune during the coronavirus pandemic.

The artists shared with us, through interaction with “Cyborg Interface” and the creation of artificial neural networks captured by physiological signals derived from a moving body, a performance in which we asked ourselves about the power relations between our bodies and devices digital with which we interact.

"Our day-to-day activities that do not have an online implication begin to atrophy." This phrase introduced the room text that preceded the performance. In a way, it seemed to predict a very near future in which our relationship with other bodies has been radically digitised.