- watch: 5th July 2019 at 4pm UTC
- duration: 10min
alias personae (2018) are three former avatar selves of Zander activated for liveness by way of person-screen duet. Stills from performance and video are archived as a webpage work parsed by words from Kristian Vistrup Madsen’s speaking/writing “Why I Can’t Write Fiction: On real-life experiences and the question of presence in art and writing” for Nordens Biskops Arnö’s Debutant Seminar, June 2018. alias personae Live1 and alias personae Live2 were presented at LUDWIG in Berlin by Olympia Bukkakis, and alias personae Live3 was presented by SomoS for the exhibition Personae – Behavior & Authenticity for 48 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin.
BIO:
Zander Porter (1994, Los Angeles) is a Berlin-based artist working in the space between liveness and onlineness, embracing videography and embodiment to propose new social orders with complications for selfhood and communication. He abstracts personal, identity-(de)forming experiences from virtual and physical spaces of roleplay, including online reality TV competition games, MMOGs (massive multiplayer online games), Berghain, the nuclear family, and anonymous/online intimacies. Zander’s work negotiates attention, connectedness, affect, subjectivity, and participation through an approach to popular/internet culture and commodity detritus with a mixture of curiosity, reverence, and skepticism.
Zander graduated with high honors in Art Studio from Wesleyan University in 2017 with additional studies in Computer Science, Queer Theory, and Performance Studies. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and his performance and video installation thesis work I’m your pixelpleasure was awarded the Elizabeth Verveer Tishler Prize. Zander also completed programs in Game Development at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad and German at UCLA. In 2018 Zander was awarded a commission by Dirty Debüt to create ADHD Penetration, an interdisciplinary performance co-produced by Sophiensæle and björn & björn.
Zander works in and outside of Berlin individually as well as part of XenoEntities Network (XEN), a platform for discussion and experimentation focusing on intersections of queer and gender studies with digital technologies. XEN presents programs that consider posthumanism, xenofeminism, cyborgs and prosthetics, surveillance technologies, and virtual reality, speculating about new forms of existence and bodily expansion within digital realms. Zander has presented solo and collaborative projects at transmediale, Spektrum, 48 Stunden Neukölln, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Gropius Bau, Los Angeles Art Association, Weirdo Night! with Dynasty Handbag, Kampnagel, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, University of the Arts Bremen, and Institute for Art & Art Theory of the University of Cologne, among others. ARTIST’S WEBSITE