Border anatomy ( Valid until 30 June 2010-Day 122)
At the border the body is not only verified but also performed. The screen becomes a site where all the body informations are assembled and confirmed. Me=screen, all that is me is on the screen, body becomes invisible, but it is not disappearing. Manovich believes that screen based representation ‘fix the viewer in time and space’ and such a representation therefore effectively ‘imprisons the body’ (Manovich 2001:105). On some level, this corespondents with what Maike Blekeer writes about the historical anatomic theatre, where the body as well is demonstrated and performed in the same time. Anatomy involves cutting and studying of the bodies, therefor through demonstration “performs constative acts that produce knowledge by means of a public demonstration of ‘how it is’ with the body.’ (Bleeker 2008, ) . Both the border verification and the anatomy theater demonstration, are what Mieke Bal (1996) has termed a ‘gesture of exposing’ that involves the authority of a person who knows, who points to bodies and is capable to ‘construct’ the body ‘as it is’.
At the border this constative acts of producing the body ‘as it is’ can be analyzed in terms of three different positions involved. The first element/person speaking is the border officer, that is demonstrating and constituting the body on the screen. The second element/technology is the data, the digital information accumulated and assembled on the screen for the body. And finally the body, the third element, the person who is analyzed, verified, assembled, but is not capable to speak for him-or herself. This third person is dead, a mute object there to prove the authority.
And how do you go out of that silence, how do you become something else then an object? A body submerged in silence.
[...] a similar manner, Maike Blekeer writes about the historical anatomic theatre, where the body as well is demonstrated and performed [...]