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



sorry, I didn't really word that right.

It is a video of me. It was shot a couple of years ago. It was taken at the end huge shoot that went on for many days in the studio. In the video, over about 10 minutes, I start of laughing and end up crying. Now i have reworked it, the movement of the audience edits the video in an interactive interface. If the audience moves, my face moves. The more movement, the image also becomes blurier - you can't see it clearly anymore. When the audience stills, the video freezes and also becomes clear. Too much movement causes crying. And then its hard for the audience to make is stop - to calm the image.

I am now overlaying the hypnosis sound to that video. But now, I also have the same footage - laughing, crying, under hypnosis (eyes shut though), so I might use that instead. Still in the midst of it.

On 14/07/2006, at 8:11 AM, Christina McPhee wrote:

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.

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Tina Gonsalves
http://www.tinagonsalves.com




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