Hole Bodies: Kari Altmann's Core Samples

The Immaterial Problem

Let's play 20 Questions.

Is it an animal? No. Is it a vegetable? No. A mineral? No. Can it fit inside a breadbox? No. Inside an apartment? Sure. Does it feel? No. Can you touch it? No. Can you see it? Yes. Is it hard? No. Is it sexy? Depends on the person. Was it made by a person? It can be.

The answer is a hole in the ground.

The deliberately absurd game introduces one of the central questions behind Kari Altmann's Core Samples: how do we classify something that is defined by its absence? A hole has no independent material of its own, yet it occupies physical space. It can be seen, measured, entered, photographed, and experienced. Its existence depends upon the material surrounding it.

This tension between absence and presence is fundamental to Core Samples. Rather than treating the void as nothing, Altmann's exhibition considers absence as something capable of becoming physical, psychological, and even digital.

The Digital Body

Traditionally, the human body has been understood through its physical characteristics: feet, hair, skin, movement, smell, weight, and touch. The body occupies a particular place and can be encountered directly. The Internet introduced another kind of presence that initially appeared much less tangible.

By 2011, however, digital identity had already become an increasingly significant part of everyday life. A person's Gmail account, Facebook profile, photographs, messages, and online activities could all become extensions of their physical existence. Although these things were made of information rather than flesh, they could influence relationships, memories, reputation, and social identity.

This idea of the digital body gives Core Samples much of its conceptual force. The exhibition asks what happens when something originally understood as immaterial begins to occupy a tangible place in our lives.

The distinction between physical body and digital identity becomes less convincing when an online presence can follow us everywhere. Our digital traces can outlive a particular moment, circulate independently of us, and become recognizable representations of who we are. In this sense, the digital body is both absent and present at the same time.

Inside Core Samples: A Laboratory of Objects and Images

Altmann's exhibition resembles an eccentric laboratory. Found objects, sculptures, photographs, and videos are assembled as though they were specimens waiting to be examined. The arrangement creates an atmosphere somewhere between an art installation, a scientific display, and a collection of fragments recovered from an unfamiliar world.

Among the works are objects whose meanings emerge through their relationships with images and video. A solitary yoga ball and footage of people immersed in mud create an impression of bodies that are physically absent from the gallery but remain strongly suggested by what is left behind.

The exhibition repeatedly moves between the recognizable and the strange. Everyday objects become evidence. Photographs become fragments of bodies. Video becomes a substitute for physical presence. The viewer is encouraged to look at these materials not simply as individual artworks, but as pieces of a larger system.

This laboratory aesthetic is particularly important because it changes the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. Instead of presenting a straightforward narrative, the exhibition encourages investigation. Objects appear to be clues, while images and videos provide incomplete evidence of something that is never entirely present.

When Internet Art Enters Physical Space

One of the most interesting aspects of Core Samples is the exhibition's relationship with Internet culture. Altmann's Web-based sensibility brings together images and references that feel native to online culture, then places them inside a physical gallery.

That transition is not always seamless. The difference between art on the Internet and art in a room becomes visible through the physical objects that surround the digital material. What works intuitively on a screen can acquire a completely different character when transformed into an object, sculpture, photograph, or installation.

The literal core samples and glossy photographic objects sometimes create the impression of a scientific theatricality. The gallery begins to look like a laboratory stage, complete with specimens and instruments for examination.

Some of the individual objects succeed particularly well. A travel headrest cushion, for example, directs attention toward the absent warmth of a body. The object becomes interesting precisely because of what is no longer there.

Elsewhere, however, the integration of digital imagery, sculpture, found objects, and installation can feel less comfortable. The exhibition's strongest ideas sometimes appear to be fighting against the physical language used to present them.

A Haunting Digital Presence

Despite these tensions, the Internet imagery in Core Samples possesses a strange longevity. Altmann brings together fragments of online culture that might otherwise disappear into the enormous stream of digital information.

Images such as Alien facehuggers and Aboriginal imagery are placed alongside other pieces of visual information, creating an unexpected cross-section of Internet culture. Their juxtaposition feels chaotic, but that chaos is part of the work's character.

Online images are simultaneously present and detached from the bodies and places that originally gave them meaning. They can be copied, transformed, redistributed, and separated from their original context. Altmann's exhibition turns that condition into a physical experience.

The resulting effect is almost spectral. The images seem to possess a corporeal presence while remaining fundamentally detached from the body. They are there, but not entirely there; physical enough to occupy the gallery, yet digital enough to resist traditional ideas of material presence.

Kari Altmann's Core Samples in the Context of Contemporary Art

Seen from the perspective of contemporary art in Philadelphia in 2011, Core Samples captures a moment when the boundaries between online culture and physical exhibition spaces were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

The exhibition does not simply ask what Internet art looks like. Instead, it asks what happens to our understanding of bodies, objects, images, and identity when digital information becomes part of everyday physical life.

This makes Altmann's work particularly interesting as an exploration of digital identity in contemporary art. The body is no longer limited to its physical outline. It can also exist through images, profiles, archives, photographs, videos, and information distributed across the Web.

At Extra Extra, these questions were translated into a physical installation. Objects became specimens, images became evidence, and absence became a kind of presence. The result was an exhibition concerned not only with what the viewer could see, but also with everything that remained just outside the frame.

Conclusion: Presence, Absence, and the Digital Body

Kari Altmann's Core Samples approaches contemporary art through the unstable boundary between the physical and the immaterial. Its laboratory of objects, photographs, videos, and Internet imagery asks viewers to reconsider what it means for something to be present.

The exhibition's central idea is ultimately simple but difficult to resolve: absence can have a physical effect, while something immaterial can become an important part of our material lives.

In that sense, the hole is an appropriate metaphor for the exhibition. A hole is defined by what is missing, yet it occupies space. Likewise, digital identity may not have the physical properties of a human body, but it increasingly shapes how that body exists in the world.

Core Samples leaves that contradiction deliberately unresolved. Its images and objects remain caught between the physical and the digital, between presence and absence, and between the body we inhabit and the many versions of ourselves that exist elsewhere.