Rapid growth in wireless and digital technologies is extending virtual topographies. For example, surveillance cameras, security devices, on-line simulation games and cell phones monitor acoustic and physical traces through digital code, stimulating zones of comfort and discomfort and creating new spaces of socialization and cultural mores. Smartbodies is concerned with these spaces of tension, noise and pleasure created within and between physical bodies, on-line users and ubiquitous information and surveillance technologies--- spaces that are in-between the crash, lag time, silence, emotional breakup, digital drop out, uncertainty, voyeurism and monitor-controlled experience.
 
Smartbodies construct and participate in tele-acted situations with flesh bodies, ghost bodies/on-line users, technological tools, immersive environments and multiple spaces. In these situations, there is no one author, but many collaborators, including mainstream hackers, computer programmers, web designers, conceptual designers, artist-run centre organizers and technicians, event participants, internet surfers, performance artists, feminist and post cyber feminist activists and theorists, plus many others.
 
Tagny Duff views live art as starting point for investigating ideas and concepts surrounding the notion of virtual, psychological and politicized geographies. Her recent performative work looks at how virtual technologies (such as the cell phone, radio, and surveillance camera) are creating new forms of action and interaction in the social world, located on-line and in the physical realm.
 
> www.smartbodies.ca
 
Appearances:
> CTM.04