Luminous Devices: Corinna Berndt

CORINNA BERNDT

Corinna Berndt is a visual artist who lives and works in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Her practice incorporates digital media, video installation and collage. Influenced by her background in sculpture and spatial practice, her work addresses pre-conceived notions surrounding embodiment, materiality and disembodiment, when navigating the digital realm. Through experimenting with glitched media, poetics and fabulations, Berndt explores the various personal and often mythologised relationships that appear to continuously resurface between physical matter and seemingly intangible, digitalised information. Berndt recently completed a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.

LUMINOUS DEVICES

Ten years ago, I accidentally captured my heartbeat with my digital camera. I was lying on my back in the grass near a river in Germany. My camera was resting on my stomach, lens facing upwards. I was recording a deep blue summer sky, with several clouds floating past. When I reviewed the footage, I noticed a perceivable pulse in the image. The video had recorded the sky together with each beat of my heart as it was pumping blood through my abdominal aorta to the rest of my body. Enmeshing the evidence of my physical existence at that particular point in time and space, with the clouds in the sky, the digital recording had become an accidental imprint and index of my vital signs. The digital camera had translated the recorded information of my body and its surroundings into seemingly intangible binary code and signal, and in doing so, effectively circulated the trace of my existence within the camera’s digital processes and electronic circuit boards. Unfortunately, I lost the file shortly after capturing the recording. Yet, this now unrecoverable data recording my heartbeat, unintentionally inscribed into the digital image of a summer sky, has remained encoded in my memory.

I have since contemplated the intriguing possibility that this accidental yet intimate interaction with the digital device inadvertently proposes that our relationship to technology has the potential to generate multiple variations of what it might mean to compute data. This has in turn led me to wonder how the invention of new technologies and novel understandings of what it could mean to be human might point towards a multiplicity of situated and networked understandings of human-technology relationships, with each in turn offering differentiable functions in the digital imaginary. It became increasingly apparent to me that despite there being no universal technological imaginary for understanding new digital technology, it is also important to acknowledge the persistence of undeveloped analogue and digital technical cultures.[1]

Art can function as a tool for emphasising more intimate, familial and speculative bonds between humans and digital technologies. By extension, artistic practices can interrogate the mutually responsive interplay of the technological imagination on our perceived understandings of new technologies. The work presented at Mars Gallery reimagines narratives that might emerge in digital record keeping, through speculating upon their continuous relationship to the material world.