Angelos Floros
Video performance: Mariana T Kotsanou
Interactive installation
Exhibited: soft RA+M — Realities Altered, Realities Emerging, Media Arts & Technology End of the Year Show 2024, Elings Hall, University of California Santa Barbara, June 5, 2024
Guest artist, hosted by the Media Arts and Technology programme (Marcos Novak, Chair)
An interactive installation on the fluidity of gender, and on the interconnectedness of masculine and feminine forces within the same body.
The work returns to Izutsu, the Noh play that had already provided the ground for The Well Cradle (ZKM, 2020) — the play in which a woman looks into a well and sees her husband's face where her own should be. What was there staged as an audio performance is here rebuilt as an installation a single visitor can enter and operate.
There are two sensors. One stands for the masculine, one for the feminine, and each is bound to its own material: approaching the first draws out imagery and sound associated with strength, action and vitality; approaching the second, with nurture, intuition and receptivity. Held apart, the two behave as the culture that produced them says they should — as separate things, each complete, each excluding the other.
The installation's argument is made by what happens when a visitor engages both at once. The two streams converge, and the balance that results is produced not by the system but by the body standing between the sensors — which is to say that the harmony is not demonstrated to the visitor, it is performed by them. The person who wants to see both energies at the same time has to occupy the position where neither is pure.
What the piece is after is contemplation on the fluidity of gender roles, and on the beauty of a human identity complex enough to hold both. The boundary is not argued away. It is simply put somewhere a body can stand.
Built with Processing and an Arduino-based circuit carrying the two sensors, with video and headphone audio; footprint 8 × 8 feet.