ABSTRACT
In Body Provisional, a performance installation created by Sophia Lycouris and myself in 2002, we told stories of the body’s interior. Our materials were movement, X-ray photographs, rhymes, interviews and the stony, semi-organic material of shells and sand. In the performance, we handed a small digital video camera to our spectators as we engaged them in one-on-one performances. On the camera was a small, LCD display, showing close-ups of crashing waves and sand traversed by traveling feet. Peering at the small display cradled in their hands, the screen lit up in the dark performance space on NYC’s Lower East Side, our participants were invited to feel the pull of our movement. In this performance, we used digital technology to present a form of intimacy: the camera became an addendum to living bodies. Traces of embodied living became part of the formal elements of the video: in the recording of movements on a beach, the camera operator’s movements were recorded, as well: we breathed while holding the camera to our eye, so the camera shifted slightly, as our feet moved across sand, the camera recorded the instability of our hand’s grip. In the performance space, the camera and its LCD display remembered these movements on the beach, offering to our spectators vague sensings of our embodiment.
