Word: locurto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault's selfportrait.map runs through April 9 at the List Visual Arts Center, in the Wiesner Building, 20 Ames St., on the MIT campus near the Kendall Square T stop. Gallery hours are Sun. through Thu., 12 to 6 p.m. and Fri., 12 to 8 p.m. Admission is free...
...thanks to advances in digital photocartography, you can be too. Or bigger. Or whatever. While the rest of the world is using scanners and code to make two dimensions look like three, to rotate molecular models, conduct on-line house-tours and reconstruct mid-air collisions, artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault have flipped things around: what would three dimensions look like if we wanted to make them only...
...thing the Global Positioning System cannot do is tell a surgeon where to cut for an appendectomy. In 1996 MIT's Council on the Arts gave LoCurto and Outcault a grant so they could make maps of their naked bodies using digital scanning and cartography software. The List Visual Arts Center is home to the resulting exhibit, selfportrait.map, featuring 18 large-scale color prints. Unlike hides on a wall, these skins never fully surrender the fantasy of three dimensions, so that as the form is flattened, it also tends to careen. LoCurto and Outcault are deformed as pure surface...
...funhouse mirrors there is therefore an uncanny disjuncture between what you see and what they feel, and we're hard-pressed not to gather the skins in our minds' eyes back into something a little more presentable. Picking out bits here and there we can just about guess what LoCurto and Outcault look like...
...nice thing about the digital destruction of the body is that there's no blood. Why, then, do these pictures remind me of the hospital? Because sanitation is a funny thing. Unerotic pictures of the naked body always look clinical, as if LoCurto and Outcault were undergoing a simple procedure. Something very out-patient, covered by the HMO--something that might only hurt for a second. The catch, of course, is that they are: if these pictures tell us anything in the context of portraiture, they tell us what someone looks like, sort of, when they are being scanned...