One day artificial intelligence might well identify any object that passes in front of its sensors, and with far greater depth and accuracy than humans. For now, we have smartphone apps like CamFind, which allows users to take photos of objects and identify them through visual search technology.This tech is flipped on its head by new media artist Erica Scourti in her new work Body Scan, in which she records through screenshots a process of "photographing different parts of the artist's body through an iPhone [image app] that identifies visual information and links it to online data."
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Scourti built this video "snapshot of mediated intimacy" from dozens of iPhone screenshots of Camfind search results, which she said was tricky given the speed with which the app's info pops up and disappears. Scourti narrates the video's visual search results, which, when fused in this way, vary from the robotic and absurdly funny to the surprisingly sexist."At times assuming the instructive voice of a body scan meditation, the accompanying voiceover draws on the search results to convey relational uncertainties and sexual energies entangled with and commodity descriptions," Scourti told Motherboard. She said that this game, which people play both alone and with their lovers, turns skins into "readable interfaces full of the potential for miscommunication and signals connections between embodied, private experience and public, commercial data."Scourti said that "Body Scan" grew out of her interest in how artists—particularly female artists—have imaged themselves, their lovers, and their sexuality using the technology of their day. She cited Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneeman, and Frances Star as influential forces behind her work, mostly because their efforts weren't seen as simply the result of technological advances. Scourti was also interested in what she observes as the "normativity coded into visual search," as in many other algorithmic processes."[B]reasts are okay, vagina is offensive, but also certain body parts being necessarily 'woman' and 'man' (not trans for example), and even that these are the only gender categories that exist," she added. "Also, women's breasts and other attributes bring up suggestions for how to change them—the body as a source of commercial value across a spectrum of products and services."Like the above artists, Scourti cast herself as test subject and the person conducting the experiment. She called the performances "gesture[s] of vulnerability" which have analogues in asking a new lover to take photos, sext, Skype sex, and so on. Scourti was also interested in what it now means to share these "private moments," and in the idea of the screenshot being both documentation and the outcome of an "embodied, felt gesture," contrary to ideas of technology and the internet as being immaterial realms.Body Scan will appear in Berlin, Germany from January 28 to February 1 as part of Transmediale's "Capture All," which "explore the limits of digital culture's pervasive logic of CAPTURE ALL and its quantification of life, work and play."