RE-U-MAN
Re-U-Man is a web project by Udi Aloni that reinterprets the functions and aesthetics of the human body through the uncanny juxtaposition of erotic imagery and quasi-religious texts.
Re-u-man is a web project by Udi Aloni that reinterprets the functions and aesthetics of the body. The site brings together erotic imagery, quasi-religious texts and often uncanny juxtapositions.
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/beyondinterface/hazan_sacred.html
Aloni reiterates the de-humanising , anonymous face of the web, where man
is a non-human, a de-human or gender-less anti-human. By combining visual
midrashes (Talmudic commentary) with political, cultural and theological
commentaries, and woven into the all-incorporating Kabbalistic web of the
'Tree of Life," Aloni has created a digital vessel for his ambitious and
prolific imagery.
I found it quite fascinating, the similarity of the Dionysus myth and the Jehovah myth. In both, the divine body is torn to pieces and spread all over the world. One of the main Sisyphean projects of the Jewish people, according to the Lurianic Kabala, is to re- collect the pieces of the divine body, or the sparks, try to separate them from the dirt that had merged with them, and reassemble the pieces into the original whole. Even though they never succeed in creating the original God they manufacture mutations of God. Some are funny, some monsters, but all fascinating.
The Re-U-Man structure is an attempt to build a protocol that will help me merge the scattered pieces of the "I", the "I" that is torn by late Capitalism, by the old Marxism, by the sham of Modernism,
and by the vagueness of Post- Modernism.
Udi Aloni, 1996
Aloni's canons of the secular and non-secular, combined with his powerful
erotic imagery, create a compelling protocol that flows in virtual space
and requires several hours of the visitor's time to travel, retrieve and
combine.
In post-modern tradition, Aloni electively incorporates text, gnostic
writings, the New Testament and the Bible, combines and blurs sexual
identity, and calls on personal and collective mythology.
Through the presentation of digital information, imagery, and audio
narrative, both Aloni and Amerika have found efficient vehicles to help
them/us try to understand this digital Golam, or to come face to face with
the Re-U-Man.