Visual Artist
Today, our mobile phones, our most common tool for communication, have affected our behaviours and our daily lives. My research started off with observing how people handled themselves, with their smart phones, in public spaces, as some of these gestures are quite hilarious but also frightening. I also stumbled across a document, on Internet, called Curious Rituals, lead by Near Future Laboratory research group out of California, that catalogued all these new “digital” gestures. The one that caught my attention for this piece of artwork was “Cell Trance”, a diagram where a person with a cell is walking around in circle, joyfully.
With these observations and references in mind, I started photographing myself,
in stop motion, walking in circles in a studio, as if I had a cell phone in my hand.
I photographed myself doing different “Cell Trance” gestures, ranging from happy to frustrated and angry attitudes, as well as paranoid ones.
I then took the images and created several video sequences. Subsequently, I
placed each sequence inside a virtual white box, which created a grid-like image. On the fringe of the frame, I placed the larger video sequences, and the smaller ones were placed in the center, thereby creating a mise en abime by multiplication and duplication.