Skip to main content

Moving or Being Moved

Sabine Gruffat

2020 00:10:54 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Animation, Body, Dance, Labor, Video games

Description

The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?

3D Modeling and Motion Capture: Sabine Gruffat, Adobe Mixamo

Music: 

The Birth of Venus, © 1982 Musica International (dab of Ciani0Musica, Inc.) (ASCAP). Composed and Performed by Suzanne Ciani. From the album Seven Waves on the Seventh Wave label

Soul Girl, © 1973 20th Century, written by Joel Biel and performed by Ahmad Jamal. From the album Ahmad Jamal ’73

All other music composed and performed by Sabine Gruffat

Text:

Trisha Brown, Accumulation (1971)

Yvonne Rainer, No Manifesto (1965)

Thomas F. DeFrantz, DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez, eds. Black Performance Theory. Duke University Press (2014)

IPsoft’s Amelia, Human AI. Research studies of motion in relation affect and mood

About Sabine Gruffat

Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist who works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces, as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.

She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, 25FPS in Croatia, and the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.