BUFFER: WRESTLING DIGITAL HYPERABUNDANCE AND THE PROJECTED CORPOREAL, OR: HELP!! THERE’S PLASTIC IN MY F*CKING BRAIN š±š±š±Ā
My entire living memory has been in the proximity of screens; conception beyond is unimaginable. Corporeality has been subsumed, rendered indivisible from the strangle of digital hyperabundance and plastic junk.Ā BUFFER explores the semiotics of distorted digital images, embodying an ouroboric amalgam of digital, corporeal, and plastic; cementing the liminal tether between referent and rot.Ā
In BUFFER, the wrestler is positioned as an avatar of the perpetual degradation inherent to simulacratic reproduction. Just as the wrestler’s existence is predicated on the spectacle of self-destructive martyrdom, the digital can only distort and decompose through memetic proliferation.Ā
The plastic mirrors the digital. Its ubiquity is inescapable, its fixity permeating into earth and bodies. The rot of hyperabundance bleeds from the constraints of the digital, choking the space between corporeal and virtual. The metaphorical melding of screen and flesh is rendered trivial when compared to the image of flesh become landfill.Ā
Matthew Mifsud is a multidisciplinary artist from the western suburbs of Naarm/Melbourne. His work examines the distortive capabilities of the corporeal figure and its symbiotic, degradative relation to archival media and subculture. Plundering forgotten images from digital junkyards, Mifsud collages new forms from their remains, embracing compression and artifact. Mifsud fetters the intangible liminality of lowbrow cultural memory to the static immovability and finality of the sculptural form. Amalgamated allusions to memory, body, and their ouroboric impermanence compound, the simulacra blistering in saturated distortion. Mifsud magnifies the ephemeral biomechanical relationship between screen and flesh; fragmenting form and language under the hauntological gaze.
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