selfie shamanism @aotu space

How is the body (re-)acting in a situation of being caught in realities between absence and simulation and his challenged analog presence? Dancing? Facing it’s own double as a digital shadow? Unspectacular everyday movements are suddenly interrupted by outbursts, manifesting manyfold tensions of nameless distances appearing, bridging gaps between the visible and invisible. Performer and Choreographer Daniel Aschwanden in collaboration with media artist Conny Zenk use practices like “face.scan”, digitally produced and graphically layered videos accomplished by an audio composition by composer Veronika Mayer to present large projections, referring to the practice of the selfie to approach the question, rather asking new ones then answering. The difference to the situative procedure of capturing ephemeral moments of depicting oneself consists in a performatively extended way of creating images by applying a slow-motion choreography of the smartphone across the face. One ́s own image (recorded by the smartphone) is contin- uously exposed and videotaped, a lifely and durational extraverted selfie. It is strangely recompleting the face, deconstructed and parted by media. The gadget suddenly belongs to the face like a pair of glasses.

The use of the smartphone despite producing images continuously displays similarities with a microfone, and the images generated are constantly evok- ing the comparison with a spooky practice of x-raying oneself, producing a streamx of data which again is read and visualized as an everchanging grid, accumulating to layers of noise devouring the image, it’s source.