CRAM Seminar June 4 - Ecstatic Corpse: Research-Creation in Bodily Decomposition. KS Brewer (Rensselaer)
Christopher O'Neill
Please join us for a seminar with artist-researcher KS Brewer, who will be visiting Narrm/Melbourne in connection with the exhibition of their work at the EMERGENCE[Y] exhibition, opening June 6th at Science Gallery.
Title: Ecstatic Corpse: Research-Creation in Bodily Decomposition
Presenter: KS Brewer – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY)
When: Thursday 4 June, 5:30pm-6:30pm
Where: Research Lounge, Level 5, Arts West, University of Melbourne
This talk explores the potential for ecstasy within processes of bodily decomposition through Ecstatic Corpse, a research-creation project currently exhibited at the Science Museum in its exhibition Emergenc[y]. The project brings together art-science fieldwork—observing and recording decay through audio, video, and sculptural forms—in an immersive installation that speculatively imagines the experience of ecstasy in decay. During decomposition, the physical boundaries of the body—cellular membranes, DNA integrity, organ cohesion—dissolve, releasing the organism's components into the world. These biochemical processes are ecstatic in a literal sense: ek-stasis means "to stand outside oneself." Both ecstasy and decay necessitate the dissolution of the singular, autonomous entity in the process of transformation, emphasizing radical becoming over static being. Decay, in this framing, is an ecstatic unbinding at the material level—an undoing of individuality in favor of entanglement with the environment, inviting new relationships with a future that seems to promise increasing entropy.
In this presentation, the artist explains their process and critically links concepts and methodologies to forensics, new materialism, and queer death studies, before previewing the project's next stage: an ethnographic collaboration with the REST[ES] taphonomic facility at UQTR in Canada.
BIO: KS Brewer is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, exploring how life is normatively preserved and extended in ecological and medical contexts, and alternatives made possible from queer standpoints of death and decay.