From angels to cybersculpture

Antony Gormley has moved on from The Angel of the North. He's gone all hi-tech on us. From laser body-scanning 51 Australians to recreating pixelated bodies from the virtual world, he is entering a new era. Michael Glover watches him at work

The massive galvanised-steel gate slides back to reveal a huge concreted courtyard, eerily empty but for two steel sculptures at either end, both by Antony Gormley in the 1980s, both gently rusting, and, tucked into the corner, a very full skip. One of the sculptures, Present Time, shows a human figure, arms spread, balanced upside down on top of another, joined where the heads might be. Except that there are no heads. And the lower section is not exactly a body, either. It looks more like an elongated, home-made bomb. A young man, in a smeary white boilersuit and protective headgear, pops his head around the door of the workshop at the top of the courtyard. "You've come to see Antony?" He lets it close behind him as I follow. This creates a bit of a problem - I've never had to heave open a heavier door. Security is clearly a big issue here.

But when I step inside the new, purpose-built workshop/storage space/library/meeting-room etc - Gormley moved up here to north London about three months ago, bidding goodbye to the converted laundry in Peckham where he'd worked for about 11 years - there's no sign of him at all. Instead, there are four men working on different Gormley sculptures, all variants on the theme of the body, Gormley's abiding preoccupation. Some of the work looks hard, dangerous and time-consuming. One of them is sitting on the floor, organising lengths of thick steel wire. Jonathan, who let me in, is standing wielding a gas welder in front of a cantilevered figure in foetal posture, fashioned entirely from small compacted blocks of steel.

A third is sitting cross-legged on the fork of a yellow fork-lift truck, on a wooden palette raised several feet off the ground, wrestling with a seemingly endless coil of steel wire. The truck itself looks gleaming new, like a scaled-up toy. Other sculptures stand about the studio, some on the floor, others hoisted up on chains almost to ceiling height. One is suspended horizontally, just below the skylight, like some lost astronaut pleading for home, home.

Gormley joins me just then, from a back room. Sensible grey boots. Baggy trousers spattered with plaster. Hands ditto. I tell him that I admire the fork-lift. "No sculptor's studio is complete without one," he says. Then he invites me into the back room, in the centre of which a life-size body cast made of plaster stands. Various plaster heads stare down at me from high shelves. One looks rather like the William Blake death mask that Gormley has always admired so much. There's a square hole in one of the arms of the full-height plaster figure that he is standing in front of, with a wooden wedge jammed into it. "Would you mind if I just attached a hand?" he asks. I tell him to go ahead. He fiddles.

This is curious. Gormley, alone in this small space at the back, is working with the kind of old-fashioned tools that Rodin might have recognised. We chat about the new studio. He calls it "an industrial unit for creative work". It's three times the size of the Peckham space, he tells me, and it's very "fluid". And the neighbours? Meat- packers, plumbers' merchants and, in Brewery Road at the back, a Waterstone's distribution centre. Not to mention Egg, the music club. It's also, conveniently, just five minutes' walk from where he lives. "I think it must be the most central industrial unit in London," he says. "We make a bit of noise, and it's practical..." Why did he move up here in the first place? Schools.

Then we go back into where the heavy work is going on. Gormley gives me a guided tour of new works in the making, and also introduces me to various key works that sit around as sources of inspiration. Pleased to meet you, Domain 10, I mutter under my breath. There is no one better at talking about Gormley sculptures than Gormley. He offers gravity and intellectual credibility where there might have been doubt, hesitation, and even confusion. He talks in complete sentences. He tells you about the evolution of his ideas. There are two main areas of investigation at the moment, he explains. He shows me a life-size figure made entirely from blocks of steel. "This is a series called 'block pieces', he says. "I'm recovering these pixelated bodies from the virtual world. If you look carefully, you'll see that at the points of maximum compression, the matrix is tighter."

I look. It's tighter all right. Another body crouches. "These things weigh 400kg each," he continues, fondling its head. This series will be shown at the White Cube gallery in Hoxton, north London, in the spring. "What I'm attempting to do," he tells me, rising to his full height - a little over 6ft - again, "is to re-figure the body, less in the language of art than in the language of physics or science. I want to describe the human condition through an understanding of the invisible world. In this crouching figure here, for example, we can see an elision between the crystalline concentrate and the minimum space it can occupy from a position of complete withdrawal - as at Guantanamo Bay."

Now I am standing directly in front of an extraordinarily dense coil of wire, with a ghostly body at its centre. This one is called Feeling Material, he says. It's all about frozen trajectories, the orbiting path of protons, the idea of the body as an energy field; the body as absence, void, space.

How many assistants does he have working with him at any one time?

"Between six and 10," he says. This is not so much Antony Gormley as Antony Gormley Inc, I think to myself. His most ambitious single project of the past 18 months has involved him spending several months in Western Australia. We go out of the workshop and up a galvanised-steel staircase to an upstairs meeting-room to talk about all that. This is a lovely, pristine space with a glass-topped white table and flowers at its centre. Gormley wipes away a pesky smear on the glass as we sit down.

There is something about the idea of Australia that had always appealed to Antony Gormley. He made an early Field there in 1979 - 1,100 terracotta figurines arranged in the shape of a magnetic field - and, that same year, a site-specific piece within the landscape. Last year, he spent several months there making yet another installation, this time in celebration of the Perth Festival's 50th anniversary. (A film about the making of that work will be shown on 28 December at 3.50pm on Channel Five.)

He closes his eyes in that upstairs room in north London, and tries to formulate exactly what is the lure of Australia. It's partly to do with the flatness and the emptiness of the interior. The emptiness of the continent reminds him of the emptiness of the insides of our bodies. It's also to do with the great age of the continent, the woozy-head-inducing sense of geological timelessness. He has installed his figures on "the lip of the edge of the world", at a place where "everything slows down", "close to the beginning of things". The installation itself consists of 51 thin, tall, spiky figures dispersed across the gleaming white surface of a salt lake. They are long, thin, narrow forms. Limbs hang forward; torsos bow back. They are all about 400m apart from each other, and the tallest, "Edward", is about 1.8m high.

"That salt lake is situated," he says, pressing his hand to his brow, "on the Yilgarn - spelt Y-I-L-G-A-R-N - Craton - spelt C-R-A-T-O-N - which is the largest single piece of Archaean - A-R-C-H-A-E-A-N - rock on the surface of the planet, formed somewhere between 2.5 and 2.9 billion years ago." I feel like thanking him for having anticipated my ignorance. I also marvel at those facts.

This body of sculptures has a collective title, The Insiders, and Gormley made them in the following way. He invited a group of people from a small town called Menzies in the remote outback - hardly even a town (population approximately 100), more a fast-truck-drive-through these days, to have their bodies scanned by a highly sophisticated cyberware body-scanner. He takes up the story.

"This scanner uses a laser beam that takes increments of half-millimetre contour readings in exactly the same way that you might take a topographical reading of a landscape through contours, and it translates the body - say the body is 150cm tall, that's 1,500 contours - and those contours into about half a million digital coordinates, so that each coordinate would have a number of points along it that are registered..." Exactly.

Each scan took about 15 seconds, but in order to be scanned, you had to take your kit off, and some of the locals felt a bit queasy about that at first, especially at the request of a well-spoken, 6ft-plus white man from the Old Country. But all went well in the end, and once the scans had been done, the body images were then reduced to about one third of their volume, thanks to a software programme designed to do just that. Polystyrene models were then made. These were then embedded in sand, and molten stainless steel poured into the sand mould. The statues themselves were made from an alloy of steel, iron, chromium, nickel, molybdenum and trace elements of vanadium and titanium oxide from Lake Ballard itself. The project went from idea to scan, to computer, to workshop in Perth. On this occasion, there was no need whatsoever for any intervention by a hands-on sculptor.

But what does that word "insider" mean exactly, I ask him. And, more to the point, what does it claim? He strokes his chin. "It means that the work should be thought of as a sort of probe or diagnostic instrument that in some way lies beneath the surface geologically, but also socially, historically, politically... The inside is to the body what the memory is to consciousness. It's a kind of core or residue, some internal concentrate that has nothing to do with the skeleton. It's an entirely 'found object', really, that is inside everybody - but has never before been revealed, as it were..."

But if it's nothing to do with the skeleton, what was the purpose of doing a 360- degree scan in the first place?

"It's an objective correlative for the internal state of somebody. If life inscribes in the body an attitude, this is an abstraction of that attitude from the physical appearance of the body."

So, it's a kind of embodiment of a person's character?

"Yes, exactly. I mean, my basic thesis is that life inscribes in the body its signature, and that what I'm trying to do is to abstract that from the things that distract us from that immediate apprehension of somebody's character, and I would say that the body is the language before language..."

These are big, if not extraordinarily arrogant, claims. Gormley, an "outsider" from the other side of the world, is saying that by doing his scans, and producing from them these kinds of volumetrically reduced, semi-abstract sculptures, he has got at some inner essence of the human state that other, lesser beings have failed to reach. Could this be pseudo-metaphysical gobbledygook? On the other hand, it's possible to argue that what he is doing on this occasion is what he has always said that he's been striving to do in his sculptures: to provide an objective mapping of a subjective condition.

I am particularly puzzled by the way in which the sexual appendages have been treated in these works, though. The penises look as long and flappy - though they're not flappy, of course - as dogs' tails; the breasts resemble long-handled wooden spoons.

He explains the difficulties. The body volume had been reduced to such an extent that it was necessary to create bridges from which to hang the appendages...

A few minutes later, he asks me whether I'd like to see a photocopy of the visitors' book relating to the site. He'd been sent it from Australia. That way I could see for myself what the response to the installation had been. He walks away to give me a chance to write down a few of the entries. Here is Greg Tossel of Glen Forrest, Western Australia: "The people of the desert melt into the haze of the infinite space." Norah Lovelock from Melville was having a tougher time of it altogether, though not necessarily enjoying herself any the less for that: "The thunderstorm and crawling back in the mud added to the drama."

As we walk back through the courtyard, we talk about the two sculptures I'd seen when I first arrived. Present Time, he tells me, is about the present moment. "In order to feel alive, you have to have a body. It's pretty obvious."