PARNASSUS

In this cyborgian experiment, a body approaches a wall of projected light and tries to pass through it. The light is a film: an architecture of dissolving frames within frames, each depicting the act the body now performs — a threshold that does not arrive. The imagery is composed in conversation with — not generated by — machine-vision aesthetics, then projection-mapped onto an architectural arch the body must negotiate. For an instant, body and projection share a coordinate. To enter. To press. To dissolve. Skin is overwritten by pattern; flesh, indistinguishable from image. The performer becomes the seam: a living frame within the film that contains it.

 

The camera waits. Its shutter is held open. In the seconds the body negotiates the arch, light gathers on the sensor — the performer cannot witness what is being made of them. The performance dissolves. The projection dissolves. The photograph endures — what Barthes called that-has-been: a certificate of a presence that no longer is.

 

Apertura, in Latin: an opening. Here, the body becomes the apertura. The film records a future; the body performs an unrepeatable present; the photograph fossilizes a past begun seconds ago. Three temporal layers in one plane: the recorded, the live, the fossilized.

 

Apertura asks what is admitted in passage, and what remains of the body when flesh and image share a single skin.