Vesna McMaster - Sit/Stand

Making bodies do what they do not do naturally is one of the oldest demonstrations of power; which is kind of bonkers if you think about it. Logical authority would be the optimal use of bodies to their most suited capabilities, not their demonstrative repurposing. Drill sergeants training recruits to stand, march, and look in unison may (and do) argue that practice grows abilities where there were none; but bodies deprived of any movement standing on sentry, or bodies in constant movement on forced marches, both have a habit of giving out and dropping to the ground. Bodies forced to sit excessively will also rebel, throwing up blood clots and varicose veins as their spines collapse in on themselves.

In truth, despite being presented as discipline, learning, practicality, or productivity, the very imposition of the suboptimal methodology is the demonstration of authority; an imperative that empowers the imposer. Torture legitimates the practitioner’s narrative through the pain the body produces. Bodies braced, buckled, pushed, strained, trained, forced through any number of transitive verbs demonstrate the potency of the verber.

The ‘Doping Olympics’ or ‘Enhanced Games’ is happening right now. Given humans’ inveterate propensity for subversion, I wondered whether someone would defy the ethos and secretly go ‘natty’ – and sure enough they have popped up, subverting the subversion of steroids, hormones, stimulants, and equipment. It seems they don’t have to pass tests to show they’re taking drugs – yet. Meanwhile the biohacking companies swarm in a media frenzy. Athletes’ bodies are simultaneously living laboratories and billboards for products whose ultimate relevance is only measured in saleability. Every muscle strained pulls the corporate machine forward.

All the smartwatches tracking the exhausted checkout worker’s infrequent steps, monitoring the data entry clerk’s slouching back and sluggish circulation, in turn map their observations into global databases. As they join to calculate insurance risks and back-hack our anonymised biometric data, how quickly will they coagulate into a heaving vortex of information with sufficient gravitational pull to suck us all in? As the lumpen mass of all those steps and beats and stimulants implodes in on itself like a dying star, it strings us into a singularity of data points, merged at last into an infinity of nothingness, of ultimate interconnectivity. The unending darkness that swallows light itself.