ABSTRACT
ORLAN is one of the few body artists who continued working with her body in digital media alongside live performances and traditional exhibition projects. Thereby, ORLAN’s body of work shows various strategies to remain visible. Interestingly, she seems to circumvent the traditional order of the embodied event, its historicity, and its remnants. Drawing from a Duchampian notion of indexical art, one can pursue the idea of thinking of an ORLAN-network rather than trying to approach it with post hoc reasoning.
One of the interesting aspects of the ORLAN-network is that the spectator navigates guided by the artist’s indexical finger, which is markedly different from a common perception prevalent in the digital world, which prefers the thumb as its pivotal point.
Here, the question arises, what does digital mean in this case and how does it relate to the event and its remnants in ORLAN’s network? As ‘digital’ etymologically refers to ‘digitus’ = finger, number, one can distinguish at least two opposing ideas, a more interactive thumb style that seems to grant access to the remnant’s hidden origin and an auctorial index style. In this chapter, Wolf-Dieter Ernst proposes to better understand this dynamics of access and withdrawal within ORLAN’s (digital) network in reading especially the late hybrid portraits against the backdrop of earlier radical performance art.
