Rendered (2017)

Rendered is a video mediated live performance. Performing in a darkened gallery closet, I use electroluminescent wire in primary colours (red, yellow, blue) to highlight gestures, but make my body invisible. A coil of red wire is placed in a glass vitrine, forming an abstract foetus that I held in a loose reference to the Madonna archetype. The actions were captured using two cameras — one shot was a slit scan camera, which lays down only one line of pixels from the video at a time next to each other. The second is shot at one-frame-per second, creating a lagging effect. The projections, which are only what the audience sees of this performance, are screened as layered on top of the other, appearing to be a single video. The only allusions to a body being present in the image are the bits of flesh momentarily illuminated as I grasp the wire with my hands and teeth, providing a fleeting break to the linear forms. The motivation behind this work was to create a body that is both visible and invisible; where gestures are externalised through light, yet the traces become an ephemeral means of drawing across the pixelated screen.

I present an analysis of this performance in the book chapter, “Strange Mothers: The Maternal and Contemporary Media Art in Ireland,” in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice.

Presented at Livestock: Get Real at the Complex, curated by Eleanor Lawlor and Francis Fay.