Dyscorpia was an exhibition that took place at Enterprise Square Galleries, Edmonton in 2019 and gathered artists and thinkers in visual art, design, contemporary dance, medical humanities, virtual reality, sound creation, computer science, and creative writing in order to question what it means not to know the limits of our bodies. Dyscorpia is not science-fiction. Dyscorpia is historical time and biological time entangled. It forces past and future in a deadlock, so the present can be squeezed inside out for you to see.

Science-fiction used to paint a future in which we’d stand with unimpaired bodies and fair minds before elegant black boxes containing all the knowledge we’d ever need. We all know that future isn’t happening. There was never such a thing as a clear-cut, seamless body in the first place. Hazy biological thresholds have always haunted us. Art, medicine, and technology have their own ways to think about them. But today our biological thresholds have become manifold and we need new metaphors to help us think accordingly.

We are rushing to our daily tasks with handheld microcomputers amidst waves of data perpetually analyzed, processed and re-expelled by artificial intelligence. We find ourselves moving tentatively, in eerie silence, with virtual or augmented reality appendages attached. The medical imaging that informs us about our health no longer lies in dark specialized rooms. It moves around us and through us, and near everyone will at one point or another see their body and its processes refracted in 3D and in bright digital colors. All the while our nervous systems never rest. Desires and fears for tomorrow espouse the ebb and flow of today’s sound and image environment. But we would be wrong to think all that precedes is disembodied. On the contrary. Artificial intelligence is not disembodied. Nor is virtual reality, or medical imaging, or sound, or even our fears for what’s to come. Everything leaves an imprint. The imprints that characterize our time simply possess a consistency and outlines we haven’t yet learned to see.

Dyscorpia was sparked by Isabelle Van Grimde’s Eve 2050 project. The Eve 2050 web series will be featured at the centre of the Dyscorpia exhibition and the Eve 2050 stage production will come to Edmonton in Fall 2019 with Brian Webb Dance Company.

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