“Some Thing”
Ian Haig
16 Aug → 7 Sept 2013

A fusion of David Cronenberg’s New Flesh and William S. Burroughs transmuted bodies that populate The Naked Lunch. When referring to the junkie’s mutating body in The Naked Lunch, Burroughs sees it as loosing its “human citizenship and was in consequence, a creature without a species”. Some Thing, is too perhaps a creature without a species, an aberration of flesh, guts and gristle that renders the human body as unclassifiable meat. It is what Burroughs refers to as un-D.T. – Undifferentiated Tissue, a condition whereby the body and it’s flesh liquefies and transforms into a new form.

The work references the teratological body, the body turned inside out, its internal viscera exposed and appearing in places that it shouldn’t, like a DNA experiment that has gone horribly wrong. The work too plays on notions of the abject and uncanny, as the body appears caught in between states of the living and the dead, in the throes of dying or possibly being born. Some Thing depicts a body that was possibly once human and is now on its way to being something else, it is either sub human or post human, we can’t quite be sure.

This is a body that maybe represents the subjective state of disease or illness, and how such conditions alter our very imaginings of what the body is. Our latent fears, unconscious horror and disgust of the body manifest as a thing not of this world. The work too is concerned with ideas of attraction/repulsion of the body and how the two are more closely aligned then we think.

The sound to the work by PH2 also extends many of the themes of the work, by providing a soundtrack of the internal body in Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

Credits: Concept, development, direction and original model by Ian Haig. Production and fabrication by Fiona Edwards. Robotics and electronics by Martin James. Sound by PH2 (Philip Brophy and Philip Samartzis).

Ian would like to thank Drew Harding, John Barcham and Creature Technology Ltd. This project has been funded with the assistance of the Australia Council, Inter-Arts Office, 2011.

Ian Haig works at the intersection of visual arts and media arts. His work explores the strangeness of everyday reality and focuses on the themes of the human body, devolution, abjection, transformation and psychopathology.

His work has been exhibited in galleries and video/media festivals around the world. Including exhibitions at: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artec Biennale – Nagoya, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Museum of China, Beijing, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and The Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles. In 2003 he received a fellowship from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council.