Leżąca Postać: Limit-Forensics was developed as an experimental live performance, over a 6-day Instagram-based residency program for Dual Existence (@dualexistence / dualexistence.gallery), a performance art platform curated by Kate Stodart to query the translation of performance art to social media space during the COVID-19 lockdown.
For my contribution, I worked with a collection of assets including “surveillance footage” of a private performance and an evolving accumulation of subtitles. Taking interest in Instagram’s emphasis on the vertical feed, Leżąca Postać was realised as an ever-stacking tomb of recursive visual, audio and poetic-didactic data-layers.
Through the use of an interface/pre-formed framing system, an archive of performance footage was spatialised by a process of live re-coding: a network of adaptive didactics unravelling and re-configuring an interior logic of the base actions. In the connections, evolutions and iterations found in the delineation of the binary of image and language, and in that of the binary of truth and fiction, the recorded figure becomes a groundwork for a narrative to form organically through the procedural threading-together of certain repetitions of gestures and script. Much like in the artwork by surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński from which this project takes its title (translating from Polish as Lying Figure), the relations of figure and ground are at once fluidified and monumentalised.
The final outcomes of this project include a short film (the total accumulation of 1-minute "live-coded" video pieces posted to the Dual Existence Instagram), and a collection of responsive image works which translate the procedural narrative of the footage-performance into a "haunted media" aesthetic of dated video game assets.
