Agentive Matter, 2017
Performance, 12-15min., 1920 x 1080 HD
Agentive Matter is a video and new media performance that explores the tension between material and symbolic communication. A database of one thousand images of historical artifacts is collected and mapped into a 3D superstructure that houses and forms these objects. During the performance, I grasp and bend this structure with a sensor that tracks my hand. Gestures of grasping or grouping mid-air morphs and bends the structure folding the images into one another creating new relationships, meanings, and matter. Through the form of aleatoric composition and improvisation, I am interested in literally touching the unseen structures where the language is both developed and dissolved, provoking a criticism concerning duality separating knowledge and being.