Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

CGI-rendered avatars, or ‘rendered bodies’, are found across contemporary artists’ films concerned with digital culture, appearing in works by Hito Steyerl, Peggy Ahwesh, Sondra Perry, Cécile B. Evans, Ed Atkins and Frances Stark. Rendered bodies are nexuses linking several bodies—poised as performative continuations of the artist’s body; presented as stand-ins for the non-anthropocentric bodies of platforms and systems; placed in relation to spectators’ bodies—and filmmakers deploy these figures as cyphers through which to reflect on a range of problems and experiences connected to digital culture, from shifting configurations of power and control, to intimacy, eroticism and sensation.

In this paper, I consider how artists mobilise rendered bodies in ways that amplify digital literacy through a discussion of one case study: Ed Atkins' Even Pricks (2013). Even Pricks centres on a rendered thumb, which is initially held in an upright position to mimic the online Like icon, and is then manipulated throughout: rotated to become a thumbs down; inflated and deflated; involved in various penetrative couplings with different materials and orifices. I begin by identifying the specific model of digital literacy that operates in this film, applying Jacques Rancière's educational model of spectatorship and aesthetics to the digital terrain. I suggest that, via the plasticity, metonymy, and metaphor animating the rendered thumb, Even Pricks invites spectators to draw associations from within and beyond the artwork, encouraging reflection on a ubiquitous digital sign (the Like icon) and transforming it in the process. I then discuss some of the main associative meanings that emerge in connection with the thumb, including meanings related to: 1. datafication, surveillance capitalism and emotional manipulation; 2. computer-based immaterial labour and neoliberalism; and 3. sex, sexuality and gender.