The unveiling of "A Body Has Many Members"

A Body Has Many Members

Please join us for the unveiling of A Body Has Many Members by Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum on 24. of September 2015, 13-15pm at Carlsbergvej 14, 3400 Hillerød, Denmark - Find you way here: https://ucc.dk/campus-nordsjaelland

”For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body..” – (Corinthians 12:12)

”A Body Has Many Members” is a public commission for the UCC (University College Capital) Campus Nordsjælland commissioned by the Danish Agency for Culture and the UCC. It consists of over 30 screens scattered across all parts of the campus that show a real time visualisation of the College’s institutional infrastructure. On these screens the invisible flows of economy, knowledge and power are made visible in a visual language akin to computer games, or scientific visualisations. Individual members of staff and students appear as avatars

The project proposes a new visual metaphor through which to consider the institution: as an organic and ever-changing organism, defined not by its physical dimensions but rather by the activities that happen within, and around it. By visualising data drawn from lesson plans, evaluation structures as well as economic data this installation focuses attention on Campus Nordsjælland, its situation within society and the individuals that make up the institution.

”A Body Has Many Members” addresses the ancient metaphors of the human body that continue to shape the social and political imagination today. Since time immemorial the human body has been used as a metaphor for social and political relations. Today we still refer to the ‘head of state’ often without recognising or acknowledging the metaphor and its embedded ideology and social norms. This project hopes to leave these ancient bodily metaphors behind in order to adopt metaphors that are more in line with what constitutes a body in present-day science and an institution in contemporary society.

The project is the result of three years of intense work and represents an experiment with data-based public commissions on the part of both the Danish Agency for Culture and the UCC. The project has been realised with the help of Rasmus Erik Voel Jensen, a team of talented programmers from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the consulting architect Jørgen Kreiner-Møller and the staff of UCC Campus Nordsjælland.