Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror and the defamiliarisation of the human body.
Meatspace is about the confrontation of the body. A reminder that in our increasingly mediated reality our bodies are still trapped within Darwinian husks of meat and sacks of flesh. As the user moves through a series of meat rooms, there is no narrative, no game, no interaction, no logic, no end, no beginning, just meat.
Meatspace was a term first coined in the mid 1990’s first wave of VR evangelism for those trapped by their flesh, by the limitations of their messy and wet meat bodies. Twenty years later we are still trapped by our flesh, but our bodies now extended through an electronic landscape. Meatspace is no longer a separate category to our mediated world but implicitly part of it
