The body is both an absolute recorder of one’s past and a powerful influencer of one’s future. It captures all that we are - genetically, socio-economically, and culturally, all that we have experienced and all that we will become. It is a physical entity defined by function, corporeal and cerebral. In addition to the body’s function as a signifier, I am interested in highlighting its role in chronicling and forming our experiences, both within a social context and in our mental and physical evolution.

 

 

"In any culture codes for bodily communication are conventionally elaborated and, like other codes, require skillful manipulation. The body is the most familiar of all communicative modes, as well as the sensible center of human experience, which lives or dies with it. Upon it, all other codes are inscribed to a greater or lesser extent. There is no form of communication that does not require the body's engagement...The body is a convenient touchstone by which to gauge, explore, and interpret the unfamiliar, an essential information-gathering probe we never quite give up, no matter how sophisticated the supplemental modes available to us."

—Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century.