[-empyre-] Bare Life : mirroring and empathy in Tina Gonsalves' work

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Tina,

How does this work,

"if they move too much I start to cry.."

do you perform a cry, are you live or onscreen in the video?

Did you film this in advance under hypnosis, and then associate the  
clips in an interactive interface so that the audience movements when  
they reach certain limits, trigger crying clips?


On Jul 13, 2006, at 7:20 AM, Tina Gonsalves wrote:

> I feel exposed especially today. I am working on an interactive  
> piece that looks at mirroring and empathy. I spent yesterday with  
> the director of the clinical hypnosis unit who works a lot with the  
> neuroscientists ( I am currently artist in resident at the  
> Institute of Neuroscience, UCL). We have been working on a few  
> projects together. I needed to start working on the sound of a  
> responsive video piece that is about mimicry. It is quite personal.  
> Basically, a video of my facial expressions mimic the movement of  
> the audience, but if they move too much I start to cry, and through  
> movement they have to work out how to calm me. Anyway, I needed  
> sound, and I am very much interested in capturing authentic  
> emotions, those that are stripped back from social conditioning. So  
> he hypnotized me into these various emotional states. We recorded  
> it all. I was nervous at the release of self control, and didn’t  
> think I would be hypnotizable. But for over an hour, I felt these  
> visceral strong emotions of different events in my life.. Today I  
> am exhausted, and feel raw. Yesterday I found myself reliving  
> events that I haven’t thought about for years. Strange, deep. I  
> haven’t been able to look at the tape we recorded. Today it seems  
> hard to pull it into my work. How do I now edit this? How will I  
> fight the self censorship? but maybe I will feel different about it  
> in a few days.