Twisties!

by Alice Lenay and Théophile Gay-Mazas

In this visual and performative setup, my body is embedded in a video of the Olympic Games. We focus on a specific sequence from the 1996 Olympics, when the gymnast Kerri Strug injured her ankle but continued the competition to win the gold medal for her team. By being directly caught up in the image, I try to connect with Kerri Strug to question her about what she might be feeling. 

This strategy of imitation allowed by the live inlay-overlay effect (easily available on software like Zoom) is a way to investigate the mechanisms of empathy we engage with other images when it is common to become images ourselves (from selfie to videoconferencing). It seems now that we can share images with our heroes, as much as our heroes seem to share our personal spaces. 

This work is at the crossroads of philosophy, media studies, and visual arts, and follows a methodology of performance as research.1 Thus, we unfold a set of issues specific to this dialogue with images.

Allowing physical empathy, exploring image contamination

By embedding myself directly into the video I am watching on my computer (overlay and inlay effects) I follow the athletes’ movements as if I were disinhibiting my mirror neurons! I am directly summoned by the images, animated by them, they contaminate my own movements. 

Investigating images through our bodies 

This dance with images allows us to question our relations with the athletes’ bodies, but also to highlight the way these worldwide sporting events are staged and how this influences us. Indeed, I do not only imitate the body movements of Kerri Strug, but also the editing, playing on the scale differences between the different framings of the recorded image and the image of my own body that I produce and control live (by moving towards and away from the camera on my computer). Here, there are two points of view (from the two videos) that must co-exist. The choreography sheds light on how certain fundamental characteristics of images function: framing and angle of view.

Mapping images into our personal space 

With this technical setup, we are able to relocate bi-dimensional images into our three-dimensional viewing spaces. This is because matching the positions of our distant cameras involves moving around in space (again: it is about choreographing a framed body). This allows us to deploy the image both on the ground (with a series of marks and reference points) and on the body (with the learning of different body postures). 

Questioning body control 

We explore a twofold system of body control through a setup of connected cameras and screens. Kerri Strug’s body is subjected to a sequence of movements, precisely evaluated by a jury and closely monitored by cameras and screens; and I am myself embedded in this sequence from the Olympic Games, my body framed by a camera, monitored on the screen and controlled by an algorithm that tracks my movements to constantly cut out the contours of my body on the image, distinguishing between background and figure. 

In this double control of bodies, however, a burlesque dialogue infiltrates: I struggle to follow the gymnasts’ movements, in a clumsy tracking that shows not only the intensity (which takes an absurd turn) of certain situations (what is this body doing floating upside down in the air?), but also how large-scale sporting events are filmed (how is this body tracked, what grand and collective narrative is made of this body through the staging of different viewpoints: camera, jury, coach, team, parents, audience?).

In these disjointed perspectives, our two bodies, mine and Kerri’s, enter into a dialogue, raising existential questions about the narratives of our female bodies in images.

Authors 

Théophile Gay-Mazas is a film editor working mainly on essays and hybrid films. The works he has been involved with have been shown in Cannes, Locarno, Nyon, FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel, and other festivals. For some years now he has been taking part in performance art, and his interests range from alternate states of consciousness to computer programming. 

Alice Lenay is an artist and researcher on the AIAC (Art des Images et Art Contemporain) team at Université Paris 8 where she teaches. She produces performances and video installations, often collaborative, in which she examines our desire to meet one another.  

References 

Haseman, B. ‘A manifesto for performative research’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, n°118, 2006: 98-106.