My abstract has been accepted for presentation at the British Society of Criminology conference at the University of Portsmouth. Here's my abstract if you feel like reading it!:
Video conferencing has replaced the need
for inmates to physically appear in certain criminal procedures. Transmitted
from a small, remote video booth in a correctional centre, the incarcerated three-dimensional
body appears virtually in the courtroom as a convenient two-dimensional
indication of a body. We have moved from the corporeality of the accused person
in the courtroom dock, to a real-time image of the criminal body immobilised,
segregated and secured on a screen – a new observatory of humanity where
dissymmetry is assured. As we seemingly enter an anti-somatic era, is the
criminal body becoming obsolete? Contemporary society has an ambivalent
relationship to the body where harvested bio-data is privileged over the idiosyncratic
physical body. Kathryn Conrad suggests that the current move away from
embodiment towards treating the body-as-information is affecting the ‘very ontology
of the body’. Already there are visual substitutes that represent the criminal
body, including forensic and biometric information, and now the screen-based
virtual inmate video-linked from gaol, docile under the power of the state and
serving the interests of the capitalist system.
This new observatory and modified
visibility of the criminal is explored as a postbiological instrument of power,
political technology and observation over the imprisoned body, where the inmate
is reconceptualised and reduced to an isolated, inert, disembodied virtual
subject. My research explores the impact of video conferencing through
fieldwork involving interviews with inmates at Australian correctional centres.
The resulting data will be analysed through the lens of theories of embodiment,
phenomenology and critical criminology.
And I do like to consider my research filtered through my art practice; here's one image from a body of work, Technosomatica.
