Hole Bodies: Kari Altmann's Core Samples

Kari Altmann: Core Samples was exhibited at Extra Extra, 1524 Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia, in June 2011. The exhibition brought together found objects, sculpture, photography, video, and Internet imagery in an attempt to locate something that is increasingly difficult to locate: the body.

More specifically, Altmann's work asks what happens when the physical body acquires a digital shadow. What does it mean to have a presence online? Can something immaterial still occupy physical space? And what happens when images, information, and fragments of Internet culture become as familiar to us as the objects immediately surrounding us?

The Problem of the Immaterial

Let's play 20 Questions.

Is it an animal?

No.

Vegetable?

No.

Mineral?

No.

Does it fit inside a breadbox?

No.

Inside an apartment?

Sure.

Does it feel?

No.

Is it green?

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.

Does it make you sad?

Good question.

The answer is a hole in the ground.

The joke is simple, but the problem it introduces is not. A hole is something that exists precisely because something is missing. We can see it, fall into it, photograph it, measure it, and even build something around it, but the hole itself is an absence.

This idea of absence as presence runs through Core Samples. Altmann's exhibition is interested in things that are difficult to classify because they occupy a space between the material and the immaterial.

The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example.

An email has no physical form, but it can contain years of someone's life. A photograph may exist only as a digital file, yet it can provoke a physical emotional response. An online profile can represent a person who is nowhere near the screen on which that profile appears.

The immaterial begins to acquire a body.

The Digital Body

For a long time, talking about the body meant talking about physical things: feet, hair, skin, smell, weight, movement.

The Internet complicated that definition.

By the time Core Samples was exhibited in 2011, people were already carrying substantial versions of themselves around online. Gmail accounts contained personal correspondence. Facebook profiles accumulated photographs, relationships, conversations, and fragments of identity.

These things were not physically attached to the body, but they were increasingly difficult to separate from it.

Your digital presence could tell someone who you were before they met you. It could preserve relationships, document experiences, expose preferences, and remain accessible long after a particular moment had disappeared.

Altmann's work operates inside this contradiction.

The physical body is absent, but traces of the body remain everywhere.

A photograph can stand in for a person. A video can preserve a gesture. An object can suggest a body that has already left the room.

The digital body is therefore not simply a metaphor for an online profile. It is the growing collection of images, information, memories, and representations through which a physical person continues to exist outside their immediate physical presence.

A Laboratory of Objects and Images

The gallery feels less like a conventional exhibition space than an eccentric laboratory.

Objects, sculptures, photographs, and videos are arranged as though they are specimens waiting to be examined. Large projections and smaller monitors introduce another layer, bringing the constantly shifting world of digital imagery into the physical gallery.

A yoga ball sits alongside a video of people wallowing in mud. Neither object simply explains the other. Instead, they create a strange suggestion of flesh and blood without actually providing a body.

This is where Core Samples becomes most successful.

The viewer is encouraged to look for connections between things that do not necessarily belong together. An object becomes evidence. A photograph becomes a trace. A video becomes a record of something that is simultaneously present on the screen and absent from the room.

There is something almost archaeological about the process.

Altmann seems to be digging through contemporary visual culture and pulling out fragments. Some are physical, some are digital, and some exist somewhere between the two.

The result is a collection that feels less like a collection of finished statements and more like an investigation.

When Internet Art Enters Physical Space

The difficulty comes when this Internet-based sensibility is translated into the gallery.

The Web does not behave like a gallery.

A website has no fixed entrance. An image can be copied endlessly. A video can appear simultaneously in thousands of places. Digital material can be resized, remixed, linked, embedded, and moved without ever leaving the network.

A gallery, meanwhile, has walls.

It has a floor.

It has a particular address.

You have to physically enter it.

This difference produces some of the exhibition's most interesting tensions. The literal "core samples," constructed objects, and scientific display aesthetic occasionally make the work feel as though Internet culture is being forced into the costume of a laboratory.

Some of the objects are effective precisely because they resist that translation. A travel headrest cushion, for example, draws attention to the warm jugular that isn't there. The object suggests a body through its absence.

Other elements feel more cumbersome. The scientific theatricality of specimens, props, and displays can sometimes overwhelm the more mysterious relationship between the physical and digital worlds.

That tension is not necessarily a failure. In fact, it may be the central problem of the exhibition.

How do you put something born on the Internet into a room?

And once you do, what happens to it?

A Haunting Digital Presence

The most memorable moments in Core Samples come from the images.

Altmann brings together fragments of Internet culture that would normally exist in completely different contexts. Among them are images of Alien facehuggers and Aboriginal subjects, placed together as part of an intentionally strange visual archive.

The Internet is very good at creating these kinds of collisions.

An image can be separated from its original context and placed beside something completely unrelated. Over time, the original source becomes less important than the image itself. It becomes another fragment in the enormous archive of things we have collectively seen.

This gives the work an almost ghostly quality.

The images are undeniably present. You can see them.

But what they represent may be absent.

The person may not be there.

The original event may be long gone.

The context may have disappeared.

What remains is an image.

And the image has a strange kind of body of its own.

It can travel without moving. It can survive without its subject. It can appear on a screen thousands of miles away from the place where it was created.

This is perhaps the most haunting idea in Core Samples: that digital culture has created new forms of presence that are simultaneously detached from the physical body and inseparable from it.

Kari Altmann's Core Samples in Context

Kari Altmann: Core Samples is ultimately less interested in technology itself than in what technology has done to our understanding of presence.

The exhibition asks us to consider the strange territory between the physical and digital worlds: the photograph that preserves someone who is absent, the online identity that follows us everywhere, the object that suggests a body that isn't there, and the image that continues to circulate long after its original context has disappeared.

Some of the exhibition's physical constructions make this argument more successfully than others. At times, the laboratory aesthetic feels too literal, and the translation from Internet culture to gallery installation becomes awkward.

But beneath those inconsistencies is a compelling question.

What happens to the body when part of it begins to exist somewhere else?

In 2011, that question already felt increasingly relevant. Looking back, Core Samples can be read as an early investigation into a problem that has only become more complicated: the merging of physical identity with digital presence.

The exhibition's most powerful images are therefore not necessarily the largest or most elaborate objects in the room. They are the traces—the things that suggest something missing.

A hole.

A photograph.

A screen.

A profile.

A body that is both there and not there.

That is where Core Samples finds its most unsettling territory.