About the exhibition

My Data Body is a collaborative, multimedia installation that includes sculptures, video projection, large scale prints, an artist book, a zine, and a virtual reality artwork. My Data Body brings together different forms of personal data such as medical scans, social media, biometric, banking and health data in an attempt to make visible and manipulable our many intersecting data corpuses so that in VR they can be held, inspected and dissected. In My Data Body, the medically scanned, passive, obedient, semi-transparent body becomes a data processing site that can be pulled apart, de- and re-composed or as Yuval Harari warns ‘surveilled under the skin’. 

When developing the My Data Body VR project, Oliver recognized the potential of the VR medium as a compositional and layering space where digital assets can be spatially arranged and then captured and exported as separate image layers. In this exhibition, Oliver explores this affordance to create a series of large scale laser engraved images into spray paint on paper, and a large artist book comprised on neon woodcut and screen prints. 

My Data Body is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project made as part of the research project Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality (KTVR). Collaborators include Marilène Oliver (visual art), Scott Smallwood (sound), J.R. Carpenter (poetry) and Stephan Moore (sound). 

About the artist

Marilène Oliver is an associate professor of printmaking and media arts at the University of Alberta. Marilène works at a crossroads between new digital technologies and traditional print and sculpture, with her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. Oliver uses various scanning technologies, such as MRI and CT to create artworks that invite us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves and better understand what sociologist Deborah Lupton terms our, human-data assemblages. Marilene’s print works have been featured in several high-profile printmaking books including Installations and Experimental Printmaking by Alexia Tala and Printmaking: a Contemporary Perspective by Paul Coldwell.