[Multiple_Dwelling]


' Fakeshop Fakeshop

Coma, a 1970s science fiction film, depicts a dystopian near-future in which biological health is increased through a constant supply of biological materials (organs, fluids, tissues). Such materials are provided by a special medical facility in which ”patients” (either those who are terminally ill or those who cannot afford permanent hospitalization) are kept in a terminal coma state, so that their organs and other biomaterials may be utilized by customers wealthy enough to pay for surgery and transplantations. The film shows a vast, well-lit, and sterile ”storage room” where a multitude of coma-bodies lie suspended in a grid, each body meticulously regulated by biomonitoring technologies. It is this scene which forms the basis for [Multiple_Dwelling], a combination installation, performance, and website which attempts to comment on the current and future state of biomedical bodies.

[Multiple_Dwelling] takes up several issues related to the status of the body marked by medical-surgical, corporate-economic, and computer-network based contexts. As the range and breadth of Western surgical medicine becomes increasingly complex, the objectification of the body—a foundational moment in the history of medicine in the West—becomes more and more of an accepted notion, for physicians and patients alike. In particular, the medicine of transplantation, where demand always exceeds the available supply, has fostered a notion of the biomedical body as made up of interchangable parts, where what counts the most, what retains the greatest value, is not so much the body of the patient-subject, but rather the value of transplantable organs in themselves. This bio-economy of body parts, which currently exists in legal and illegal contexts in the First and Third worlds, is framed by medical institutions, corporate biotechnology, and a range of local and global regulations of the use of biological materials. The resultant effect is quite different from the neurological-electrical affect of the ”body without organs,” frenetically imagined by Antonin Artaud. Rather, it is a circulation of organs-without-bodies, free-floating, externalized, interchangable biological components.

As a response to the bio-economies of organs-without-bodies, [Multiple_Dwelling] pro-poses to undertake a prototypical construction of artificial, ”fake biologies” which are a hybrid mix of biomedical science, computer science, and science fiction. These fake biologies involve several types of interactions: interactions between the bodies of performers and their virtual reality avatars; the interactions between the screenal bodies generated by 3-D modeling applications and the real-time bodies of participants on CU-SeeMe; the interactions between audience members and the inclusive-intensive space of the performance itself.

[Multiple_Dwelling] does not exactly propose to be a scientific experiment, but it is equally uneasy with the notion of simply being an art project. It is for this reason that the space between the fictions of science (the discourses, histories, and contingencies of science), and science fiction (the para-scientific speculation and extrapolation of future implications of the present), provides a complex, ambiguous, and affective zone where the bodies that we are and the bodies that we own are consistently inscribed by science, culture, and embodied networks and linkages.