Unstable Object :: In Corpore Sano Presents Sophie Kahn

A look at digital artist Sophie Kahn’s project MACHINES FOR SUFFERING

MACHINES FOR SUFFERING I blueprint [Image description: A black-and-white digitally rendered image of a prone, contorted woman’s body, supported by tree-like struts.]

Sophie Kahn’s project Machines for Suffering “imagines the female body as monument.” Using 3D body scans of dancers in postures once thought to be characteristic of female “hysterics,” Kahn works with the limits of the machines themselves to create prints for sculptures that “suggest both physical and psychic instability.” Here, Kahn shares some of the prints she’s generated for this project, along with a process statement and recent artist’s talk.

Expanded and additional work from Kahn appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano.

Left: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING V blueprint [Image description: A black-and-white digitally rendered image of a woman sitting on the floor with feet outstretched, propping up her head in her hand, and supported by tree-like struts.]; Right: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING VI blueprint II [Image description: A black-and-white digitally rendered image of a woman’s body crouched in fetal position, seen from above.]

My work Machines for Suffering is the result of my ongoing investigation into hysteria, a psychiatric diagnosis that was applied largely to women until it fell from favor in the early twentieth century.

At the Salpêtrière asylum in nineteenth-century Paris, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot and medical artist Paul Richer developed charts and documents showing the physical poses that he considered typical of an attack of the disease. The female inmates there were subjected to electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and “ovarian compression” to elicit performances typical of each stage invented by Dr. Charcot. Photography was used extensively at the Salpêtrière, and this ignited my curiosity (and interest in the history of photography and illness/disability). I was drawn to the question: how was the technology of photography used to try (and fail) to capture and classify something as elusive as madness?

Left: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING VII blueprint I [Image description: A black-and-white digitally rendered image of a woman lying on the floor in a twisted pose, with head and legs not fully rendered.]; Right: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING VII blueprint II [Image description: Another angle of the body represented in the left image, now without a head.]

My post-photographic work has long interrogated the claims made for new imaging technologies and challenged the blind spots and assumptions made in their design. The precise 3D laser scanner I use was never designed to capture the body, which is always in motion. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial coordinates, generating a 3D “motion blur.”

For this series, I scanned a series of dancers and performers, choreographing them using the Salpêtrière drawings and pushing the scanner until it failed and generated glitch. After scanning the dancers’ bodies, I further edited and sculpted the results both digitally and materially, 3D printing the files and then carving, gluing, sanding, and painting the 3D print. Lastly, I incorporated the support structures that the software auto-generated to support an unstable object. The resulting sculptures suggest both physical and psychic instability. The final objects suggest a monumental female body-as-project — a form under perpetual construction (or perhaps demolition).

Left: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING XII blueprint I [Image description: A black-and-white digitally rendered image of a kneeling woman covering her face with one arm, with faint supports visible in the background.]; Right: MACHINES FOR SUFFERING XII blueprint II [Image description: Another angle of the body represented in the left image, now lying on the floor with raised knees, with head and calves absent.]

Sophie Kahn — Gray Area Festival talk, 2018. Videography by Austin Hill.

Sophie Kahn is a Brooklyn​-based Australian digital artist. She has exhibited her artwork in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, and Beijing. Recent exhibitions include ​Transfigured​ at C24 Gallery and ​Out of Body​ at bitforms gallery, both in New York City. Sophie has taught in the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute as a Visiting Associate Professor, and at Columbia College, Chicago, as a visiting instructor. She has completed residencies at the NARS Foundation and at the Museum of Arts and Design and is currently a Tech Artist in residence at Pioneer Works in New York City. Her work has been featured in numerous festivals including Zero1 Biennale, Transmediale, and the Japan Media Arts festival. Her video work has been screened on large urban screens on four continents with the Streaming Museum. Sophie’s work has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic) and other private and public funding bodies. She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Digital and Electronic Arts Fellow.

IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.

With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].