Martina Menegon and Virtual Corporeality

This past week, my Social VR class had the pleasure of having Martina Menegon, Extended Reality Artist and lecturer, come present some of her works and speak to us. Much of her work covers digital distortions and representations of the digital body, which is a subject I hadn’t really considered from such an artistic point of view before. One particular theme resonated with me in particular: the (degradation/transformation) of the boy and skin as it is “uploaded” into the virtual world.

It Suits Me Well (2016) Martina Menegon
Photo ©Martina Menegon

Two of her works encapsulate this idea beautifully, at least to me. The first, It Suits Me Well, is comprised of a 3D scan of the artist’s body, its UV Map spread out and printed onto a “semi-transparent soft cloth”. The artist recorded herself attempting to match up the printed parts of the UV overlaid with her physical self, with the (mis)match creating this uncanny veneer. The second piece, Virtual Narcissism, is a series of sculptures made by an attempt by the artist to scan herself while remaining still. These imperfect scans are full of digital artefacts, and the implicit lossiness of attempting to represent the physical body in the digital world is abundantly apparent in this work.

Corporealités (2020), Jesper Just

However, as imperfect and split apart as these representations may be, there is still a beauty to the disparity. I’m reminded of an installation piece I saw at the Perrotin Gallery last year, Jesper Just’s Corporealités. The work’s broken and split bodies - both spatially within the gallery and on the partially disassembled displays - rendered a poignant relationship between bodies and brokenness in digital space. Just’s commentary on the play between able-bodiedness, stasis, and agency comes to mind as well, albeit in the inverse. If existence in the virtual can extend far beyond the real-world capabilities of the user, where does that leave the goal of “perfectly” representing our physical selves in the digital world?