Longitudinal: LoCurto and Outcault Imagine Themselves in Mercator

We all know Greenland is smaller than it looks. And, thanks to advances in digital photocartography, you can be too. Or bigger. Or whatever. While the rest of the world is using scanners and code to make two dimensions look like three, to rotate molecular models, conduct on-line house-tours and reconstruct mid-air collisions, artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault have flipped things around: what would three dimensions look like if we wanted to make them only two?

The question is an old one. Ptolemy skewed the map in the second century AD to account for the earth's curves, unfurling a sphere into a serrated plane. During the age of exploration, cartographers scrambled again to make the most navigable two-dimensional renderings of the globe, leading to the invention of the Mercator projection in the 16th century. Taking pictures of the earth from a zillion miles away has certainly helped things along today, although "seeing" where you are on any map at all starts to feel old-fashioned post-GPS.

One thing the Global Positioning System cannot do is tell a surgeon where to cut for an appendectomy. In 1996 MIT's Council on the Arts gave LoCurto and Outcault a grant so they could make maps of their naked bodies using digital scanning and cartography software. The List Visual Arts Center is home to the resulting exhibit, selfportrait.map, featuring 18 large-scale color prints. Unlike hides on a wall, these skins never fully surrender the fantasy of three dimensions, so that as the form is flattened, it also tends to careen. LoCurto and Outcault are deformed as pure surface and spun out by algorithms into unlikely, mappish dimensions.

As soon as we get over the initial awe of seeing skin all stretched to kingdom come, what's uneasy about the pictures is the composure of the subjects: unflustered, comfortable, blank. Since these are self-portraits, we know that the models are happy to sit for the camera or cameras, and probably remain themselves unscathed. As in funhouse mirrors there is therefore an uncanny disjuncture between what you see and what they feel, and we're hard-pressed not to gather the skins in our minds' eyes back into something a little more presentable. Picking out bits here and there we can just about guess what LoCurto and Outcault look like.

The nice thing about the digital destruction of the body is that there's no blood. Why, then, do these pictures remind me of the hospital? Because sanitation is a funny thing. Unerotic pictures of the naked body always look clinical, as if LoCurto and Outcault were undergoing a simple procedure. Something very out-patient, covered by the HMO--something that might only hurt for a second. The catch, of course, is that they are: if these pictures tell us anything in the context of portraiture, they tell us what someone looks like, sort of, when they are being scanned.

The pictures are sanitized also because they stray so far afield from brush strokes or film grain or even Adobe Photoshop. When we think of image manipulation we still tend to assume some explicit mark of the artist, some tweak here or there, or some sense of humor. The tweaks here are twice removed from what you see, written into the software blueprint, and the only trace of process is a faintly superimposed, bending grid.

Unshapely splotches of white interrupt the swathes of life and limb like technographic stretchmarks, dead spaces bound up by the body's jagged fringe. These white areas are bothersome in the way unpainted canvas is bothersome. And although it is aesthetically flummoxing that two generally pleasing things to look at--portraits and maps--come out of the blender looking not quite as nice as either, beauty here is more a question of timeliness. Messing around with technology to produce art is primarily a good way to let people know what can be done, and to cultivate an appropriate degree of anxiety about what might be next.

Though these images do not feel particularly revolutionary, or depraved, they do make you look closely. With some you've got to look twice to figure out the central camera angle, which part of the body is where, what portion has been stretched thin, and which scrunched up. There is, however, after a point, something off about the fluid violence wrought by technological flourish, la Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even though the effect is a harmless optical trick, there is something staggering about knowing that the sleight of hand required careful encoding of the body as some huge number of data points. Of course this mapping is what digital photography does anyway, and we can thank the artists both for giving us one vision of its capacities, and for reminding us that "knowing" where every point is on the body might also mean that we can put those points wherever we want.

Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault's selfportrait.map runs through April 9 at the List Visual Arts Center, in the Wiesner Building, 20 Ames St., on the MIT campus near the Kendall Square T stop. Gallery hours are Sun. through Thu., 12 to 6 p.m. and Fri., 12 to 8 p.m. Admission is free.