De-Second-Naturing: Word Unbecoming Flesh in the Work of Bodies in Flight

Abstract

Since 1997, through a series of intermedial collaborations with musicians , video and sonic artists, Bodies in Flight have progressively interrogated the impact of digital technologies on our sense of our selves and our interrelationships with others, and how those technologies can be used in performance to expose this intimate process of incorporation into the human psyche-what Bodies in Flight call 'second-naturing'. This series of works has produced a sustained contemplation on contemporary human experience as an interstices in-between various discursive fields and their related technologies. SIMON JONES: What I am describing are three crucial points in the development of Bodies in Flight's aesthetic investigation into the possibilities of performance, at which, working first without and then with(in) technology, came to address Heidegger's fundamental assertion about our so-called technological age-'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological' (1953: 311). This is more of a reflection on past work than a manifesto for future endeavours; it attempts to understand as possibilities some of the consequences of the artistic decisions we took when encountering knowingly or unknowingly the technological, rather than account for them as intentions, as the minutiae of either making or interpreting the shows. It proposes that the technological offers us a privileged access into the general mechanisms whereby we all construct and sustain our everyday performances of our selves. SARA GIDDENS: I remember being somewhat fearful of working with technology. Understanding technology as that industrial, analogue now digital beast resulting ultimately in all that heavy metal cluttering up the rehearsal rooms exacerbated by the need to hump it about and S. Broadhurst et al. (eds.), Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies