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Art has explored the problem of the body and corporeality in various ways. As a result, the body was subject to constant reinterpretations in the artistic practice – as an object of different narratives, goals, politics, a field of interference, an object of artistic fetishization, sexualization or desexualization. This text discusses selected aspects of the presence and experience of the body in visual arts, referring to artistic realizations and endeavours of radically different “nature”, and thus – referring to the ontology of the work of art. The main field of reflection is the transition from the representation of the body (media images of an absent body) to the presentation and presence of a real body as a material and medium of expression. In this context, not only the consequences related to the artistic mediatization and performatization of the body and corporeality are presented, but also the tensions between observing (visuality) and the experience of the mediatized body.

The Einstein’s Brain Project is a group of scientists and artists working together to develop installations and environments exploring ideas about consciousness and the new constructions of the body. Recent work has used strategies taken from paranormal science to explore how pareidolic and apophenic impulses might contribute to the construction of our worlds.The paper considers the unbidden emergence of phantoms (the felt yet absent body) in systems of meaning making that rely on pattern recognition, and explores consequences for the flesh, in shared machine/human constructions of the body.