Hard Core, Soft Bodies

Hard Core, Soft Bodies is a collection of videos by multimedia artist Stine Deja, reimagining the human form.

The series Hard Core, Soft Bodies has originally been created for the Daata Editions online exhibition ‘Flow my tears’ – curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight / Isthisit? (see link below).

3D hybrid beings, constructed of biological organs and technological prosthetics stand in a literal ‘grey area’ making familiar sounds and subtle movements. There is an undeniable bizarreness to imagining the inner-workings of our biological bodies, but when cleaned up and stripped of the ‘mess’ a digestive tract earns the same elegance as a single unoccupied contact lens.

Hard Core, Soft Bodies investigates the complexity of the human physique and exemplifies an idea of how technology offers a way of maximizing it’s physical potential. The videos include stylised, moving body parts and unique sound pieces, intensifying the particular motion.

For it’s recent installation at Schimmel Projects Art Center, Stine Deja created a site-specific environment around the video pieces. Six tons of gravel had been installed to extract the grey zone narrative into the physical space. Deja created a unique ecosystem inside the exhibition space: the natural floor makes the environment feel both inside and outside, underlining the contrast between natural and artificial, while the smoke instates an unconscious mystery in the space by drawing on recurring sci-fi tropes.

The viewer is forced to feel they have slipped into another reality, where even the view from the windows to the ‘outside world’ is no longer as expected. This futuristic re-imagining of bodies draws on one of Deja’s key questions: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence and the technological takeover?

Stine Deja (1986, Denmark) received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2015 and has since shown her work in various places, most recently: Annka Kultys Gallery (London), UNIT 110 (New York) and SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen). In January she will begin her three-month residency for ‘Future human’ at SPACE, London.