Against All Odds and Gravity (2025)
We extend ourselves through synthetic limbs and simulated senses, constantly turning back to grasp and scratch at ourselves. And we fall short, time and time again. Relentless confrontation with uncertainty compels a craving for control. The human body itself perpetually exceeds its own boundaries, an ongoing mystery that defies our attempts to possess or comprehend it. Our own faces elude us, and in every mirror we encounter a ghostly trickster reminding us of our limitlessness and myopia.
Installation View
Against All Odds and Gravity is a variable series of video loops emerging from subversive experiments with motion capture and custom-built AI tools. In each video, unhinged bodies appear as tangled, shapeshifting masses of faces that churn and refuse to settle into fixed forms within the space of the screen. Simultaneously exposed and obscured, these hypermediated beings are vulnerable yet threatening in their ambivalent visibility. They erupt, fail to form, and cyclically consume themselves. They reflect a struggle for and against visibility in a time when we are relentlessly pursued, parsed, reduced, and reconstructed by invisible algorithmic gazes that understand identity as an accumulation of data.
First training AI models on images of her own face “face-swapped” with itself, the artist then processes motion-capture driven animations of her own embodied performances through a combination of AI tools she coerces to recompose bodies entirely out of her face. Throughout these experiments, the artist challenges AI body-detection and tracking systems’ ability to discern and continuously render physically realistic human bodies. In this piece, the animated digital bodies are driven by motion data captured during a strange pas de deux with a life-size ragdoll, whose skeletal behavior defies the expectations of the system. The resulting figures are both desperate and defiant, hypnotizing and disruptive. Realism, beauty, and desirability are pushed to a level of absurdity, as the artist harnesses her own trained AI models and repurposes online “community” sourced deepfake and pornographic optimizations to summon new monstrosities that subvert their context.