Phantom Limb

Phantom Limb is a project exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and the black box that is their interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. Amos Peled has been developing methods to perform audio-visual manipulations which transform the ultrasound machine into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin. The work investigates conceptions such as the distance of the human body from the self, the hierarchical relationship between the inside and the outside, pain as a poetic message and the lack of internal symmetry.

“In my work I am trying to create the feeling of returning from a long trip back to your room, to the most familiar space. When you first enter the room the physical dimension feels suddenly foreign, the space that is burned deepest in the place cells in the brain becomes curved, not bigger not smaller just different… you place your bag on the side of the space and sit down where the physical shape of your body has been assimilated into a foreign object. Before everything is enough to return to the normal dimension you look to the other end. A place you have never seen… a hidden layer of blue under your peeling wall. You start to wonder what’s under the blue… scratching the wall for a few hours discovering all colours of light, history itself, and layers of physical knowledge. I want to overwhelm the viewer with doubt, so that after experiencing my work, they will have doubts about the contraction between shadows and light, or at least open up an alternative nature to curiosity. A shadow for me is a two-dimensional representation of the three-dimensional, a shadow omits a dimension from the world, and represents only the contours of a being, without its volume, a shadow can represent the essence in varying magnitude, several times, in varying sharpness.”