Dancing Girl Emoji

2016

Audiovisual installation

Version 1: 1ch HD video | 1ch sound

Version 2: 9ch HD video | 5ch sound 5'07''

looped

 

In collaboration with Jade Annaw as Delta Sorority.

 

Featuring a male and female in their early twenties, the video performance work alludes to the digital facade constructed through a process of filtering, framing and editing one’s image for social media.

 

Using the Snapchat facial recognition feature as a trigger, the performers robotically transition between heightened versions of facial gestures, their expressions referencing the gestural extremities of emoticons. We specifically focused on ideas of a desire for machine perfection.

 

We were interested in capturing humanly, in-between moments which are so often edited out of our online personas - this is what we described as the slippage between the URL and IRL self. We wanted to explore the slippage that might occur through our desire to achieve this perfection. In attempting to achieve something that is above human, the body becomes Other and grotesque.

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Documentation credits: Jules Lister and Jade Annaw