Skinn & Lak, 2001

Dance III (1998)

Description

Dance III is the third in a series of works I made in the late 1990s exploring dance, physical abilities and limitations, and their relationship to virtual reality.

During the winter of 1995–1996, I was an Erasmus exchange student at Université Paris VIII in Saint-Denis, Paris. With my annual pass to the Centre Pompidou, I spent countless hours immersing myself in the dance archives that were on display for much of that year. I was mesmerised by this material, much of which I had never encountered before. I had always loved the Hollywood musicals of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and perhaps because I was also taking clowning and acrobatics classes at the university, I began creating my own dance pieces using whatever methods and means were available to me at the time.

For Dance III, I danced to Beck Hansen’s The New Pollution in a friend’s photography studio (Spessi Hallbjörnsson) in downtown Reykjavík, operating a still photo camera while performing. Once the film was developed, I scanned the photographic prints and used the software Macromedia Director to turn the images into animations.

At the time, I was living and working in a small studio at Laugarvegur, Reykjavik, where I also had borrowed a yellow drum kit. I began playing the drums along with the animation, and later that year I brought the two elements together in an installation. I would occasionally perform on the drums myself, but visitors were also welcome to sit down and play them.

The work was presented at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, where the animated photographs and the physical drum kit became part of the same environment. In a way, the piece brought together my fascination with dance, music, and the possibilities of digital animation, allowing the physical and the virtual to merge or perform alongside each other.

Year: 1998

Materials: Animated photographs, video projection, drum kit, performance

Dimensions: Approx. 6 × 10 m

Duration:

Exhibition history

2000 — Festival for Film, Liepāja, Latvia. Curated by Kristīne Briede.

2000 — Les Boréales de Normandie, France. Dance I, II, III & IV, installation and performance.

2000 — Batofar, Artists from Nordic Countries, Paris, France.

2000 — Nordic: Contemporary Art from the Nordic Countries, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. Curated by Sabine Folie and Brigitte Kölle.

2000 — It Could Be Obsession, rotor – Centre for Contemporary Art, Graz, Austria. Curated by Anton Lederer and Margarethe Makovec.

1998 — Flögð og fögur skinn (In the Flesh: Exhibition on the Body), the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Iceland. Curated by Hannes Sigurðsson.

Categories

Video Installation · Animation · Music & Sound · Dance · Performance