|
61
WEB SITE / ONLINE EVENT
MEAT:
Territory of the Body / Networked Body
INTERNET
FEST 2002
MARCH 2002
http://viande.fredforest.net
Some
people donate their body to science; the artist puts his up
for sale on the Internet—not surprising given that he’s
already sold both time and color online, not to mention artistic
square meter parcels of land through newspaper ads! Indeed,
in this online work, the artist’s body is for sale piece
by piece—like cuts of meat in a butcher display case
or lots in a real estate promoter’s subdivision. Each
parcel of flesh purchased or rented was in reality a small
section of a larger interactive image onto which the new titular
occupant planted a small flag. In addition to being an ironic
overstatement of the idea that the Internet is little more
than a vast electronic marketplace, an apparent assertion
of the declining importance of the body in an age of virtual
reality, an implicit comparison between the territorial nature
of the body and that of the Internet, and an aging artist’s
fantasy of immortality, the work could perhaps also been seen
as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to found a sort of mystical body
of Internet users on the basis of something akin to a virtual
human sacrifice.
^ |
||||||||||
|||||||||| 
