Expanded Practice Residency at Digital Arts Resource Centre, March 2022
Building on Connect, my 2019 interactive new media work, I will continue my explorations on site at DARC, working with local dancers in States of Being, a new interactive video and audio installation. It was conceived to further expand the expressive potential of interactivity by inviting dancers to engage and interact with it, shifting Connect’s focus on the embodied experience of each participant, to the more performative aspects of interactive installation. Each dancer brings their own movement vocabulary when navigating and synthesizing the videos and rhythmic audio tracks, creating a poetics of our present experience, when meanings shift continuously around concepts of distance/togetherness, safety/threat, inside/outside, individual/collectivity. Videos evoke fleeting sensibilities: dense urbanity and vast natural space, solitude and chaotic crowds, organic forms and built environment, rushing speed and slow contemplation, immediacy and distance, claustrophobia and freedom. The reactions elicited by the imagery are amplified by our ongoing pandemic lives – the solace of the natural world beckons as a refuge; crowds overwhelm; the divide between public and domestic space is heightened; a lone individual suggests isolation and disconnect. Dancers’ movements and position in space determine which of the paired videos appears within their moving body silhouette and which in the background of the projection, as well as how the musical layers build up into a soundscape. Each participant’s interactions uniquely reveal and combine video and sound, to eloquently express our precarious human condition amidst the fluctuating states of being we strive to balance.
The audio tracks were created by composer and musician Jesse Stewart, and within the installation are mapped spatially to respond to participants’ movements. Custom software was developed by Jean-Claude Batista.
