Involuntary Reception
2000
Running Time: 17 minutes

View quicktime movie of installation, clip one (7.1MB), clip two (5.5MB).
The central character of this video is a young woman whose mind and body are inhabited by unusually large levels of electromagnetivity, performed by Lucas. The two-channel aspect of this video echoes her paradoxical relationship to technology. On the one hand her mutation has exiled her from popular electronic culture, on the other hand it has enabled her to self-broadcast without the aid of hardware. How does this position her in the eyes of society at large? She is a spectacle, to some a victim, to others a superhero, civilization's least known potential-enemy, a spiritual leader, and an overgrown teenager adapting to the precipitation of technological standards.
The formal appearance of the video is a diptych: two full-motion videos positioned side-by-side. The double image video format is treated in a variety of ways, employing a visual vocabulary of flips and flops, mirrors and Rorschach-resembling moving images that add layers of meaning to the content of the monologue. The interplay between the visuals and the monologue bring current posthuman/body politic issues to the forefront. In particular references are made to surveillance, disembodiment through teleportation, and genetic cloning.
This character's story is complex. She is not sure which team she is siding with. She is tired of making these decisions: left click or right click, heads or tails, zeros or ones. She is hungry but she is allergic to everything She gets her power out of falling, crashing. "Still going strongŠ Nothing beats the Copper Top!"




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