Some of Marilene's works…
Some excerpts from her artist statement
My material is digitised bodies. Concepts such as Hans Moravec's 1988 call to 'download our consciousness to the datascape in order to survive' serve as springboards to create artworks that speculate how we might survive, refigure and evolve in the Digital Age. ...At first my work attempted to repair the fragmentation and dislocation brought about by medical imaging and to reclaim the body from the contemporary medical and digital gaze in order to poetically subvert it and offer future relics of our digitised selves. ...Most recently since moving to Sub Saharan Africa I find myself struggling with a new understanding of the medically scanned body. Whereas before the scan dataset was something I took more or less for granted, I now recognise its strong symbolic resonance signifying privilege both in terms of wealth and access to digital technology that is far from global.
And from her research statement
The aims of my practice based research project are to examine from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to digitize the body - how flesh can be translated to pixel (digital photography), to voxel (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computerised Tomography, Positron Emission Tomography and Ultrasound) and to xyz co-ordinate (3D laser scanning). By looking at the history and evolution of these technologies as well as working closely with radiologists, scientists and technicians to acquire medical imaging datasets and 3D laser scans, I seek out metaphors and poetic readings of the translations that take place as well as finding ways to repair the fragmentation they promote.
