My current work uses performative installation as a medium to satirise fashionable trends in cutting edge interactive technology and innovative forms of new media art. In parodies of computer touch-screen technology, I playfully interpret hi-tech scientific practices such as bio-mimetics, using my body as a touchpad computer interface and my own bodyhair as an instrument to uncannily create sound.
My Hairy Banjo
NCAD Masters exhibition 08 at the Digital Hub
The simple technology used in the performance creates an uncanny and unexpected phenomenological sound produced by the growing cell tissues of human body. Different timbres of note are strummed out of near invisible chords of the performers hair strung across bowls that are incorporated into the performers artificially extended body. I try to assimilate my body into the architectural background of the installation. My body is made into an object, part of the design of the piece.
The audience can make their own mix tape by recording the sounds that are produced from the strumming of the instrument onto a casette tapedeck that is available on the floor. The ephemeral sounds can therefore be archived and listened to after the performance is over.
Don't Play With Your Hair
Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, December '07
This piece is a site-specific performative sculpture that uses the performers' hair as a sound producing machine, hooked up live to an amplifier and speakers. It attempts to blend like a furry chameleon into the surrounding beige carpeted floor of the Bergen Kunsthall exhibition space. Unlike most art objects, the viewer is allowed to touch and play with the performer/artwork. Aesthetically it imitates the role of a doll or teddybear. The performer is static, incapacitated by its disguise and reduced to a playful object or automaton whose own hair cells are used for producing music. The gaze of the audience invades the performer's physical and psychological space. The performer (it)self becomes an abject objectified 'other'.
Cyberskin (Two Stage Transfer Drawing)
Filmbase, May '07
The Vacanti Earmouse is a controversial bio-mimesis project that has become ingrained in popular mythology. Veering from the grotesque to the ridiculous, fascinating symbioses of man and machine have been created by incorporating computer hardware with cloned living cell tissues. I explore this commodification of human/animal life by designing props for my performances that have an ergonomic machine-like aesthetic with inputs and outputs for processing interaction, but are costumes for myself. In this piece I am hidden inside a box, with only a square of my back showing. Visitors can use my back as a computer touchpad. I feel the fingers of the participant draw across my back, which I then replicate on a small drawing tablet concealed with me inside the box. The drawing that I make is then displayed on a monitor. It is based upon the piece 2 Stage Transfer Drawing by performance artist Dennis Oppenheim and The Turk, a hoax automaton chess player by Wolfgang Von Kempelen.
Like a machine, parts of my body are objectified as I am used as an automaton for the audience to play with. My aim is to simultaneously surprise and repulse the audience, by letting them discover that the mechanism they play with is actually a living being. As I was hidden inside the box, I had no way of knowing whom or what it was that was touching my skin. The action of touching another person is itself invasive and a caress can feel equally disgusting or loving depending upon the people involved. This form of intimate interaction between performer and viewer transgresses polite social boundaries and thus exacerbates the sense of awkwardness that is inherently felt by the participants of any performative activity.