BACKGROUND  

"This is my body" (AKA "Rhizome") was inspired by the book, A Thousand Plateaus, a book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It was the second reading we tackled in this class and provided lots of interesting visual mages from which I drew the concept for this picture. "Rhizome" is the introduction of this book and introduces the rhizome as a figurative term describing non-hierarchical networks of all kinds. Here are a few quotations:


• "A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes... The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers... We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome." -p. 7
• "A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organization of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles." -p.7
• "Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple... It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion." -p. 21
• From these desciptions, I tried to apply rhizomorphic principles to a modern invention and/or situation. It occurred to me that the Internet could be described as a rhizome with its own non-hierarchical structures, its many entrances and exits, and its potential for establishing connections between almost anyone and anything. I wanted to illustrate this, my idea of the Internet as a rhizome, while also touching upon other themes of the chapter that I found provocative.
  
  
  
  PRODUCTION
  

In my mind, a computer is the most basic representation of the Internet. The question then was, "how can I repesent a computer visually in a creative, non-obvious way?" Basically, I didn't just want to hold up an image of a computer and then give my above lecture on how the Internet is a rhizome. I wanted it to be better than that. I started to think of the many different parts of a computer, the keyboard, the hard drive, the mouse, etc. What did these all have in common, what is at the core of their physical creation? It dawned on me....the best creative representation of a computer are the circuit boards themselves that make up each individual part of the computer.

I found a circuit board lying around in the ACTLab. It was about 9X12, so I just scanned it with the scanner's lid open. I imported it into Photoshop cropped it many times over. I wanted one to be able to detect a circuit board or some sort of electrical background, but I didn't want it be blatant or overbearing. I found a piece of the image that I felt was fairly uniform, but not bland, and set that as the background layer. I also scanned in the cover of a book that I had a nice textured deep color and feel to it. I cropped it several times as well and used it for the left strip running down the side of the image. I applied blur effects to soften it up and get the final result now in the image. Once those two layers were finalized, I changed the color of the circuit board background, a forest green, to a more rust/light burgundy color. I wanted this picture to be eerie. Now, I just needed to incorporate messages from the book onto new layers. I started with the jarring quotation from "Rhizome" about "a body without organs." This quote was so striking to me, because saying something has a body infers life, but if it has no organs...no heart, lungs, or other organs to realistically sustain life with, then doesn't that mean physical death? This contradiction fascinated me. I started building upon this and inserting the words, "no heart," "no breathing," "no dying," etc. I applied various effects available in Photoshop to achieve the end results. I then started to envision a living, functioning body but with no human, physical organs....a spiritual body. The most relevant spiritual body that came into mind was that of Jesus, and that is where the centered sentence, "A body has neither flesh nor bone" comes from.