NARRATIVES OF MARGINALIZED BODIES: EXPLORING THIRD SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY NEW MEDIA AND DIGITAL ART
The disruption of mainstream media such as radio, mobile, and Internet technologies provides a unique platform to expose narratives of marginalized bodies on the periphery of the dominant culture. In the works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, John Craig Freeman, and Micha Cárdenas, the relationship between the body and interactive new media functions as a conduit for social, historical, and cultural transformation. In Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive, large-scale installation work Frequency and Volume (2003) a museum visitor’s body is transformed into an antenna, which uses the body as an activator for the work. In Freeman’s Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos (2012), consider the curious traveler holding their phone up in the U.S.- Mexican desert landscape to take a photograph, only to see skeletons suddenly floating across their smartphone screen. Through a mobile phone application, the viewer accesses images marking sites of border-crossing migrants deaths, which are overlaid onto tangible physical geography. In Cárdenas’s mixed media augmented performance Becoming Dragon (2008), the body’s relationship to physical and virtual realms becomes the means to materialize history. In all these works, the intersection between the body and media becomes a catalyst for deeper inquiry and exposition that explores the notion of Otherness through the mediation of images and sensory experiences.