A translating passage through which symbolic activation can occur.
Research presentation / English edition / 2026
Body · interface · pressure
IN/Pressures of a
Body.Interface
Poetics, clinical practice and symbolic activation in the age of Liquid Architecture.
Research presentationGina MarinAcademic advisor · Carolina Romano
Point of departure
The symptom of a
body.interface
Hyperconnected
Scanned
Monitored
Exposed to an uninterrupted flow of digital information
The contemporary body is pressured towards the continuous exposure of intimacy.
Identity becomes fragmented and the self grows tired as subjectivity is converted into processable data.
A working vocabulary
Three terms.
One sensitive system.
Forces that model presence between physical and digital life.
A fertile place where autonomy of gesture lives beside functional urgency and the aestheticised world meets material need.
Body.interface definition developed in dialogue with Ticio Escobar, El arte fuera de sí, 2004.
Research framework
A clinical poetics
of symbolic activation.
Poetics
Opens a field of correspondences between bodies, images and devices, enabling an affective reading of data.
Mobile interfacesClinical practice
A method of self observation and care that maps how external forces operate on the body.interface.
Interconnected bodiesSymbolic activation
Small interventions that restore agency, somatic coherence and the possibility of choosing how the body appears.
Modulated identitiesLiquid Architecture
“Virtualisation does not mean the disappearance of the real, but a change of state. It is one of the central figures in the contemporary mutation of our relationship with the world, ourselves, others, knowledge and power.”Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 1999 · translated from the source presentation
Virtual space is not outside the body. It changes how presence is organised, perceived and governed.
Research question
How can art activate a symbolic embodiment of the body within virtualisation, biometric control and clinical aestheticisation?
How can the body invoke its poetics, politics and sensitive sovereignty?
Working thesis
Tension the clean surface.
Contemporary clinical aesthetics are founded on cleanliness, efficiency and transparency. This research introduces an embodied poetics that restores trembling, scars and error as legitimate forms of presence.
Instead of erasing the mark, I read it.
Instead of polishing the gesture, I let it breathe.
The investigation addresses the visual and conceptual programming that emerges from veiled symptoms in medicalised contexts, where hygiene, control and optimisation operate as criteria of design.
Artistic references
The symptom becomes language.
The wound becomes aesthetic force.
The body becomes a clinical field where symptom and voice turn into expressive matter; physiological error becomes language.
M. Sinnett · The Needle and the Larynx · video performance · 2019“I work with my own voice as if it were a territory in flight. Every word carries bodies, memories and accents that never fully settle. The body becomes a living archive that does not preserve, but disperses, contaminates and transforms.”Mercedes Azpilicueta · Bodies in Transit · Museo de Arte Moderno · 2020 · translated excerpt
Sovereign politics of the skin
IN/voking oneself.
The skin is an expanded symbolic field: a sensitive network crossed by memory, affection and data.
The body is a vibrating organism that filters, translates and cares. Intimacy is exercised through rhythms and permissions. The collective appears as resonance, where the body opens shared perception and care.
Performative gesture of intimate sovereignty↔Practice of collective resonance
Research and artistic production
Two bodies as test cases.
Case 01 / Clinical Fold
From digital overdose to the recovery of presence.
Butoh and fold · photography and wound · poetic manifesto
Against a culture that demands total clarity and cleanliness, these impressions refuse perfection and search for reverberation. Friction appears between body and plane, trace and resonance. Matter becomes vibration and technique opens a passage towards the immaterial. In this interval, the sensitive is not explained: it pulses.
Context
Córdoba, 2020. Confinement, indoor exercise routines and continuous exposure to screens.
Problem
Clinical aesthetics framed the body through purity, cleanliness and control while digital existence became increasingly dispersed.
Device
A white plastic suit was sewn as a membrane: at once technological residue, second skin and sign of sterility.
Record
The camera operated as a prosthesis for listening. The still image held what Barthes calls the wound of the real.
Operation
Pressure was converted into presence. Once detached from the body, the symptom became an operative symbol.
Projection
Dispersion, overflow and saturation produced the visual condition of a fragmented identity.
“Absolute transparency exerts a form of violence on the body, erasing its opacity, its shadow and its right to tremble.” Byung Chul Han, The Transparency Society, 2013 · translated from the source presentation
Case 02 / Self Archive
A face in transit becomes an interface of belonging.
Migration · daily record · montage and movement · living archive
Context
Copenhagen. A migratory experience shaped by daily English, work routines and the constant mediation of a mobile phone.
Operation
Speed was converted into consistency through an intimate archive of learning, repetition and memory.
Device
The selfie became an internalised camera. Double exposures connected the face with corridors, windows and administrative space.
Process
Perseverance mattered more than technique. The series acquired rhythm and meaning through accumulation.
Montage
A 1920 × 1080 screen format and rhythmic white frames organised a cartography of transit.
Projection
Expansion, opening and density shaped an identity moving consciously through transition.
“Space is a mode of existence.” Ticio Escobar, El arte fuera de sí, 2004 · translated from the source presentation
Correspondences and ruptures
The works do not illustrate a body.
They make it act.
In both works, breathing commands rhythm and the body operates as a living archive. Post production becomes a clinical poetics: regulating presence, opening and closing light, creating tension without injury.
The image breathes, traces and repeats. It sustains attention, organises exposure and affirms the sensitive sovereignty of the body inside Liquid Architecture.
Methodological rhythm
A three pulse method.
Impression / Symptom
A visual or digital pressure, an emotion, or an internal friction leaves a perceptible trace. The body records it physically, energetically or emotionally. The symptom becomes a signal that asks for attention and care.
Somatic awareness / Intensification
The first sensation becomes a focus. Sustained attention reveals patterns, tensions, automatic gestures and memories. The desire to intervene begins to search for a form through artistic and performative practice.
Embodiment / Transmutation
Processed energy finds a form. It becomes gesture, image, ritual, action or artwork. Internal matter turns into symbolic matter, transforming pressure into expanded bodily presence.
Virtual experience / Are.na
Spatialising the body through a slow archive.
The hyperbody becomes an expanded tissue between matter and data. Resonance takes priority over visibility. Slowness gives the gaze time to rest; the work breathes and time regains a body.
A porous cell containing an image, text or link.
A thematic constellation: one organ within a shared memory.
The sequence is never fixed. Linking and updating continually rewrite the archive.
Public, closed or private channels support a non extractive model in which belonging is built through resonance and co construction.
Its modular architecture supports active exploration, collective intelligence and non linear visual essays. Against infinite scroll, each interaction becomes an act of attention, translation and unfolding.
Enter the living research archive ↗Conclusions
The body as sensitive technology.
“The technical image always carries a trace of what is absent: the body projects itself beyond itself, fragments and reappears.” Roland Barthes, 1980 · translated from the source presentation
The interface skin is a political act of reinscription.
Sovereignty is exercised in the smallest gestures: how the body chooses to appear, feel and resonate.
The task is to feel flesh again without denying technological mediation, keeping attention on the body that navigates, works and observes itself through screens.
Saturation becomes rhythmNoise becomes breathWeight becomes living form
Outcomes and projections
Art as an embodied laboratory for possible futures.
Opened a field of resonance between body and technology.
Revealed gesture as a form of knowledge.
Enabled relations between the human and the virtual based on listening rather than control.
Proposed a sovereign politics of the skin: regulate exposure, preserve sensitivity and sustain presence as a shared practice.
Next movements
Continue the hyperbody. Expand the Are.na archive as a living ecosystem.
Develop co performance laboratories. Explore the digital symptom through non orthodox practices grounded in a sovereign politics of the skin.
Keep art operating as research. Use it as a method for thinking, feeling and inhabiting new human and virtual ecologies.