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incorporeality of the concrete” that contemporary theory struggles, and it is
precisely here that interactive body art experiments in Manovich’s sense.
Figure 4. stuttering (2003), one channel interactive video installation,
dimensions variable, Nathaniel Stern. Four screenshots and three
documentation stills.
Nathaniel Stern’s stuttering (2003) simultaneously involves viewers
in the laborious, embodied experience of communication, and problematizes
the abstraction of the body into language. Participants cross a threshold into
the installation space, and walk across printed transparencies “containing
quotes and passages about stutterers, situations in which stuttering, in its
broadest sense, is common, and suggestions of when and where we should
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‘make stutters,’ in order to break ‘seamless’ communication.” They are
confronted with a projection that “is broken into a Mondrian-like mirror,
where each sub-section, initialized by body-tracking software, animates one
of the floor-found quotes; every animation is accompanied by an audio
recitation of its text.” (See Figure 4)
