Performed at a site-specific installation on Dec. 6 and 7, 2019 at Pomona College as part of a year-long Media Studies capstone project. A gallery document of the performance was later exhibited at Pitzer College’s Kallick Gallery. Recipient of the Scott Winslow Award in Media Studies.
I used the theatrical art of corporeal mime to examine the relationship between live performance and its documentation. The performance was a 30-minute endurance piece. I performed a 3-minute composition 10 times in a row next to a mirrored wall and a projected, pre-recorded film of the performance in a black box theater. The audience could freely navigate the installation and explore the space during the performance. The deviation between the live and recorded performances highlighted the relationship between these two mediums.
In the second semester of my capstone, I continued research on concepts from posthumanism, cybernetics, corporeal mime, and body art that informed this exhibition to write a 52-page paper, Cybermimetics: Corporeal Mime as a Model of Posthumanism.
“Corporeal mime primarily relies on the unmediated presence of the actor, but how does the mime use the human body as a form of media? With no external media to rely on, how does corporeal mime invoke a cybernetic system? In order to examine these notions, I discuss interrelated ideas posited in the fields of cybernetics, posthumanism, body art and corporeal mime… Although there is not a strong preexisting relationship between the fields of corporeal mime and media studies, I argue that media, in the form of the human body, is integral to corporeal mime… and consider ways in which corporeal mime can explore and express cybernetic relationships.”
