Autumn 2004- Glasgow: Beverley Hood at Street Level Photoworks
Review C109 With the exception of the portrait of Dorian Gray, portraits aren't usually considered uncanny or threatening in themselves, but the term 'doppelganger' - the title of Beverley Hood's exhibition of digital portraits - suggests that a representation or likeness of the subject has a 'life' of its own. The 'life' of a doppelganger is always a deficient one: usually blighted by moral blankness and often seen as demonic. Arguably Dorian Gray's portrait is sinister because it registers - but perhaps also gives rise to - the creeping moral emptiness of Dorian himself. The blankness of a ghostly doppelganger is catching. There is a contemporary equivalent to this anxiety. A recent survey undertaken at Napier University revealed that a large number of participants in online classrooms worried that their integrity unravelled when interacting with people via a technological avatar. Beverley Hood's digitised depictions of her fellow artists (on residencies in Basel) create a visual analogue of this kind of web community.  | | Beverly Hood: Doppelganger (detail); courtesy Street Level Photoworks | In preparation for these slightly larger-than-life-size figures, Hood deployed gaming software of varying sophistication to fashion three images of her naked self, Self-portrait (version 1-3) . These range from a cursory, cartoon-like 'type' to an unexpectedly complex approximation of the artist's distinguishing features. These technical experiments give us the opportunity to explore our emotional response to their varying degrees of realism. Tellingly, it is the third, most distinctive likeness that is the most disconcerting to behold. Back in the 1970s, Doctor Masahiro Mori famously showed that our positive feelings for a robot or puppet faltered at the point where they proceeded from barely-human to almost-human. He called this drop on the graph of empathy the 'uncanny valley', and it taught to animators and robot designers to shy away from extreme realism lest their figures hit the creepy state associated with the zombie or demonic doll. In all Hood's figures, there are weird rips and buckles in the digital skin surface around the neck, the breasts and the eyes, as the software struggles to cope with the vast quantity of information required to simulate real bodies. On one level these patches of digital dropout and distortion might read as a kind of monstrous deformation - a revelation of the disturbing absence at the core of the doppelganger. In the end though, these program failures serve to disrupt the illusion, and we are invited to contemplate the uncanny valley without taking the sensational plunge into repulsion. Hood's figures are ultimately poignant rather than wholly uncanny. As one might expect from an artist of Hood's intelligence and sensitivity, the material substance and the psychological challenges of today's digital technologies are explored in dialectical terms: humanity is reinforced rather than revoked, thanks to the obvious limitations of the software to approximate it. The disparities between the cartoon 'ideal' and the artist's distinguishing body parts are very frankly displayed, inspiring sympathy with both the artist and her 'inadequate' doppelganger. Kirstie Skinner is a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and Programme Co-ordinator for Spin, the National Galleries of Scotland contemporary art members scheme. Beverley Hood: Doppelganger , Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, March - May 2004
|
|
