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'Materiality of the Trace'

Digital Performance

With special thanks to collaborating artist Lizzie Ahn

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For this project, the team's aim was to create a performance piece that discusses human social and physical connectedness and disconnectedness in the context of the current technological era. To do this we initially decided to record our movements in circles (orbiting around each other by walking) digitally, using GPS tracking and body cameras to create traces in both the physical and digital world, without ever touching or interacting. The audience was to be involved in two ways. The first, through participating in the physical performance of walking in circles around each other, with controlled guidelines to create a sense of cyborg-like behaviour and their movements also tracked. The second, they would watch the footage and GPS traces being made live in a viewing cinema room, recreating the voyeuristic role we all play when viewing others on social media. However, the project had to be adapted, due to the restrictions set in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. Rather than performing in public, we moved the location into our homes and recorded the performance, using our mobile phone cameras as body cameras, and acted out a set of instructions made by collaborating artist, Lizzie Ahn. Ahn took on an omnipotent and dictatorial role, and we adopted the cyborg role. By setting it in our homes, it allowed for the private space to become public, so that the audience viewing the online video, would still have a strange voyeuristic role, resembling the blurring of public and private space on social media. All the footage ran simultaneously, and the formating was inspired by the layout on screen during the group’s Facetime meetings. As performers, we were connected by the actions we were doing, but conversely physically and geographically separate. The video brings to mind the endless TickTock video trends of our generation.

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