Exquisite Corps (artificial-life.net) (2007)

Vera Gartley's Exquisite Corps is part of artificial-life.net, a web-based curatorial project produced by independent curator Diana Sherlock. Artificial-life.net involves three senior Calgary artists, Vera Gartley, Arlene Stamp and Mary Shannon Will, and examines systematic and procedurally-driven conceptual art practices within the realm of generative technology.

Expansive systems are key to Gartley’s Exquisite Corps, which continues her research into integrated systems for art and learning. Six meditative audio tracks engage the participant in a series of short instructional procedures based on an Awareness Through Movement® lesson from the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ method uses movement and focused awareness to facilitate self-learning.8 Gartley’s instructions, delivered by Feldenkrais practitioner Jennifer Herzog, focus participants on their bodies and immediate surroundings. This Method involves users in what Gartley calls an “uncomplicated research process that might lead them to awareness in their everyday lives.”

Participants are encouraged to reflect on this process and describe their tacit experiences by entering three or more words into five text fields. The next step encourages the user to modify the fonts, colours and opacities of each entered word. All the words are then transferred to a blank screen on which the participant can manipulate the scale, form, number and position of each word to generate a drawing. Or words may be drastically distorted to eradicate the text altogether and produce other signs, marks and even images. Participants can also assign animated behaviours to their words, such as turn, breathe and slide. These movements are common to Awareness Through Movement lessons and are used here to integrate the participant’s intellectual and physical experience of their environment. The final drawing resembles a playful language-game or twenty-first-century concrete poem written in Flash. Here language operates outside of any conventional grammar or system of rules, and words are materials that take on meaning through their use.

Participants who choose to save their drawings to the community stack join a chronological archive of all previously saved works. Within this digital Tower of Babel, individual contributions can only be viewed through the semi-transparent layers of those drawings that came immediately before or after. The individual drawing is not retrievable and may not be altered, printed, saved or understood outside its communal context. Ownership and authorship are contested and meaning is produced collectively within this social space. Reminiscent of the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse parlour game, completed drawings become active catalysts for new interactions and continuous collaboration.

Exquisite Corps, like Gartley’s recent works The Gap and Collectively Speaking, embodies the experiences and interactions of a community. It provides an opportunity for users to learn about how we know ourselves through others. Exquisite Corps maps the social construction of the embodied subject in language. Through a process of naming, users enter their private selves into public space. In turn, users, as represented by their texts, are (literally) reread through the traces of others. The resulting layered and intersecting drawings leave a visible trace of this process. Michel de Certeau’s writings about how stories are spatial and form a web of connectivity between participants resonate loudly here. Unknown encounters on intersecting routes map the imaginary terrain that is our everyday experience.

Vera Gartley is a practicing artist who graduated from the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art & Design in Calgary where she has been teaching full time since 1974. After graduating with a PhD. in Painting Process and Methodology from the Union Institute, Cincinnati, Ohio in 1987, her teaching and art-making practices began to merge. Using industrial signage and fragments from advertising she produced backlit works, several of which were installed in storefronts. Gradually comments from passers-by and conversations with factory personnel and curators became the texts for lighted sign faces. More recently she has produced several interactive and collaborative installations. The Gap (1998) was shown at Stride Gallery and at the Edmonton Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of Alberta) and Collectively Speaking (2002) was installed at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum as part of their “Connections to Collections” series. Gartley’s work is represented in private and public collections.

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