A O the green screen

wearable sculpture, Moving Image & sound, 9’00” / 2020

“The tyranny of the photographic lens, cursed by the promise of its indexical relation to reality, has given way to hyperreal representations—not of space as it is, but of space as we can make it—for better or worse. There is no need for expensive renderings; a simple green screen collage yields impossible cubist perspectives and implausible concatenations of times and spaces alike.”

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: a thought experiment on vertical perspective

A commission for:

Beyond Measure group exhibition, University of Leeds Cultural Institute, 2020

Landscape and Goodness, presented by Landscape Research Group, 2020

Crochet collaboration with KobaKant Collective, Berlin

Cinematography / Arata Mori

AO in Japanese is a vast sepctrum of colour extending between blue and green. Translated into English as blue-green, AO is used to describe phenomena in nature such as flora and the ocean, but also the colour of traffic lights. AO /THE GREEN SCREEN moves between human and nonhuman dynamics and rhythms, and invites the viewer to reflect on the continuum of colour and rhythm, that conjoins culture, nature and technology.

In ancient land rituals, costumes were often created from leaves, grasses or skins, as a form of camouflage, that allowed the human form to disappear into nature.

Today blue and green screen is everywhere, used for rendering dream-worlds in multi-layered simulations of human and technological intimacy.

In VR, greenscreen makes the background disappear. But ‘away from the keyboard’ the background of green and blue is the hue of looming ecological collapse: in the acidified oceans, the forest fires, or the eerie colour of the melting ice.

The electronic crochet wearable sculpture sonifies the data from this interaction of human and nonhuman, as the dancer moves with a dynamic inspired by the Daoist belief in a distributed chi energy. Her movement attunes to the surrounding, as a way to dissolve into the ‘background’, with green screen technology enhancing her attempts at disappearance.