Can we hold a smartphone without forgetting the body?
—An interface for the forgotten body

The smartphone is no longer ‘mobile.’ The mobile phone was made on the premise of a moving body, but the body that uses a smartphone is at risk of being forgotten. Instead of meeting diverse connections in diverse places, we isolate our bodies and encounter the wider world through our brains and fingers alone. ‘Being’ is treated as something spiritual that could be uploaded to a server; the uniqueness of each being is replaced by patterns and algorithms, and the body functions as a tool for carrying out operations.

Technology and platforms seem to offer users the place of god. The smartphone condenses the user’s existence into a small device, mediates a vaster world, and grants users the right to survey and choose for themselves. Yet on the border between the omnipotence of being able to do anything within technology and platforms, and the helplessness of being merely an object following a meticulously designed user experience (UX), the spirits (靈) drifting on servers cannot become embodied. Rounded shoulders and aching hips remind those who believed they stood in the place of god that they are, after all, people with mortal bodies.

But in an age when technology and platforms are also means of production, we cannot define technology as evil and reject it. Blaming individuals who cannot regulate their dependence on technology erases the fault of platforms designed to be addictive. We can criticize expansionist corporations and states, but we cannot control every development and use of technology. N. Katherine Hayles writes of a posthuman that “embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality,” one that “recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being”[1]. What I can do as an artist in the posthuman era is to propose interfaces that resist the dematerialization of the body. We must imagine devices and protocols for recognizing the ‘user,’ objectified in the process of mediating between technology and people, as a ‘person’ once again.

Praying God is the practice of that imagination and resistance. The work is an interface experiment for recalling the body that is being forgotten, and a performance that casts a veto against the violence of UI. Nothing happens unless the audience intervenes directly. Meaning arises only when audience members become players and performers, holding smartphones and moving their bodies. Each player’s role and their asymmetrical relationships recursively become part of the work, and those watching the play are also placed within the ritual as omniscient witnesses. The work’s visual elements and actions, light and sound, are not separated but tangled together, posing the same question. Rather than telling people already living in a technological age to put down their smartphones, or rushing to a conclusion, the work shares a question to be thought through with the body: can we use smartphones without forgetting the body?

[1] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, University of Chicago Press, 1999 (Korean edition trans. Heo Jin, Openbooks, 2013, p.29)

close