Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue - Men with Glass Bodies
- Introduction
- Performance Documentation 1: Holoman; Digital Cadaver
- Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection
- ‘Who Were You?’: The Visible and the Visceral
- Performance Documentation 2: Excavations: Fresh but Rotten
- The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Moxham
- ‘Be not Faithless But Believing’: Illusion and Doubt in the Anatomy Theatre
- Performance Documentation 3: De Anatomische Les
- Of Dissection and Technologies of Culture in Actor Training Programs – an Example from 1960s West Germany
- Ocular Anatomy, Chiasm, and Theatre Architecture as a Material Phenomenology in Early Modern Europe
- Performance Documentation 4: Camillo – Memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories – A Tear Donnor Session
- Martin, Massumi, and the Matrix
- Performance Documentation 5: Sensing Presence no 1: Performing a Hyperlink System
- ‘Where Are You Now?’: Locating the Body in Contemporary Performance
- Performance Documentation 6: Under My Skin
- Anatomies of Live Art
- Performance Documentation 7: Crash
- Restaging the Monstrous
- Delirium of the Flesh: ‘All the Dead Voices’ in the Space of the Now
- Performance Documentation 8: Körper
- Operating Theatres: Body-bits and a Post-apartheid Aesthetics
- Index
Performance Documentation 1: Holoman; Digital Cadaver
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue - Men with Glass Bodies
- Introduction
- Performance Documentation 1: Holoman; Digital Cadaver
- Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection
- ‘Who Were You?’: The Visible and the Visceral
- Performance Documentation 2: Excavations: Fresh but Rotten
- The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Moxham
- ‘Be not Faithless But Believing’: Illusion and Doubt in the Anatomy Theatre
- Performance Documentation 3: De Anatomische Les
- Of Dissection and Technologies of Culture in Actor Training Programs – an Example from 1960s West Germany
- Ocular Anatomy, Chiasm, and Theatre Architecture as a Material Phenomenology in Early Modern Europe
- Performance Documentation 4: Camillo – Memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories – A Tear Donnor Session
- Martin, Massumi, and the Matrix
- Performance Documentation 5: Sensing Presence no 1: Performing a Hyperlink System
- ‘Where Are You Now?’: Locating the Body in Contemporary Performance
- Performance Documentation 6: Under My Skin
- Anatomies of Live Art
- Performance Documentation 7: Crash
- Restaging the Monstrous
- Delirium of the Flesh: ‘All the Dead Voices’ in the Space of the Now
- Performance Documentation 8: Körper
- Operating Theatres: Body-bits and a Post-apartheid Aesthetics
- Index
Summary
Mike Tyler's Holoman; Digital Cadaver began as a collection of songs about a fictional character named J.P. Holoman whose life and death parallel that of real-life murderer J.P. Jernigan. Jernigan received the death penalty in Texas in 1993, but not before donating his body to science. After undergoing MRI scanning and computer tomography (CT), Jernigan's frozen body was sliced into thousands of paper-thin sections and photographed. When digitally reassembled, he became the ‘universal human meat’: his digitalization resulted in a bloodless, dissectible cadaver for anatomy students and, perhaps, the first immortal man.
In Holoman; Digital Cadaver, the digital images of Jernigan 's interior are confronted with the living body of actor Frank Sheppard. Sheppard ‘embodies’ the convicted criminal whose body was used to produce the digital images. Tyler 's lyrics suggest that Jernigan's mind has also survived the ordeal. It speaks to us as disembodied psyche, trapped within the computer, reduced to digital information to be accessed by anyone anytime.
(Mike Tyler to audience)
Remember when human dissections were outlawed by the Church? If the authorities showed up during the operation, the corpse could be lowered through a trap door at a moment's notice, gone no more, and in his place a goose or a boar.
Many sleeves were rolled, much skin was peeled and bones were sawed, stomachs turned.
Others gaped in awe at the dark innards turned to face the light (like a shovel's blade in the dark earth turns up the wondrous hidden roots).
A man cut from the gallows and still in his boots would be the universal human meat. And it was quickly shown that the hearts of wicked men were not smaller than their own: those who would pride themselves healers and defy God's will that all life should return to dust.
(to Holoman) Lie still!
Now the rigid stiff in the CAT scanner turns
Rigor mortis network burns
The new digital cadaver is frozen and sliced…
It's time for the Anatomical Theater to begin!
(Holoman, voice on tape)
Consciousness is a subtler form of material and death is the sister of sleep (I know I met her)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anatomy LivePerformance and the Operating Theatre, pp. 23 - 28Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2008