Stephen
Takacs

Sing the Body Electric

The human body is a resilient, yet very fragile, machine. In good health, it is easy to forget just how susceptible we are to outside stimuli. These portraits, which draw inspiration from 19th century physician/photographer G. B. Duchenne De Boulogne, explore this fragility through the use of a transcutaneous nerve stimulator that causes a subject's muscles to contract when a current is applied. Unlike Duchenne, who, through his experiments with electricity and the human body, attempted to create a typology of human facial expression, I'm interested in the ways in which electrical stimulation can disrupt a reading of the already problematic photographic portrait.