Photoformance: An Empathic Environment

A photographer, choreographer and architect cross disciplinary borders to imagine and fabricate a place that embodies growth and form for the 21st century audience. We explore the decomposition and reconstitution of light, motion and structure via digital memory and an architectural space that is both visual and visceral. We envision the resulting environment as a place made up of skins from outermost to deepest interior. This supple, sensual environment is created by a video synthesis of photographic imaging and the choreography of actual bodies projected onto the skins of the physical environment. This place accumulates multiple layers, contours and textures. It becomes a walk-through body: a house to inhabit, with evidence of its occupants and their dreams, thoughts and feelings stretched like digital frescoes across its membrane walls. Photoformance proposes to experience the telematic era more deeply, without giving up the senses, the body, and the experiential. The human body becomes a metaphor for all bodies—for worlds, planets real and imagined--whose borders dissolve into a constant flow.

Photoformance embraces three sets of dialogues, and all collaborators are involved in all three of each other’s disciplines: architecture speaks with the environment as it directs and evokes both image and movement; still photography has a dialogue with the moving image in the moment of motion-capture and in the choreography of video editing; the human body converses with both 2 and 3- dimensional space, giving itself to the still image and digital memory. All dialogues converge through video projections and subtle lighting onto the constructed environment. The project becomes a shared exercise in modeling to human scale the origins of movement. The participant steps bodily into the model to experience a unique, empathic, whole-body response.

With the proliferation of photography, film/video, the X-ray, medical scanning, and electronic body mapping devices and robotics, the body becomes even more a place to explore, inhabit, invade or be invaded, to simulate or replicate. The body becomes its own site or place--its own metaphor--and establishes its own sense of time. The telematic age more often translates to breakneck speed, dizzying multiplicity and a highly evolved capacity for multitasking. New technologies, hybrid media and new modes of artistic presentation also offer opportunities for more meditative, contemplative experiences. They can provide audiences with the means to locate and orient themselves gradually—to slow down in order to see, feel, and bodily comprehend place. With subtle visual and visceral cues that invest life in the moving subject/object,the viewer assumes or “wears” the moving form as his or her own body. The effectiveness of such a cellular empathy—already primed by the brain in a dance of mirror neurons--is determined by the ability of the artistic team to provide an environment that lights up the brain and activates a mobile home theater in that viewer’s being.

Our vision is to construct an empathic experience by means of video orchestrations of slowly morphing bodyscapes and light dances onto a stunningly elegant architectural environment that both takes imagery from outside its contours and seems to emanate it from within. Imagine a membrane-like, orbiting habitation that transports and transmits into outer space (where time is no object) images defining life as we know it in our bodies on earth.  Our team--Ernestine Ruben, experimental photographer of the human form, Monica Ponce de Leon, architect of highly sensual, muscular and poetic structures, and Peter Sparling, choreographer/video artist of new movement forms--imagine an environment that appears to have temporarily landed in a large black-box space. The multi-layered environment is illuminated and designed for spectators to navigate and embody. Shifting images bathe the sculptural forms and almost imperceptibly slide along its membrane walls like slowly migrating dunes, tides, the slow-twitch muscle of a sleeping giant, or a shimmering dream of endless transfiguration from human to pure form-in-motion.