OPAF7_Eric Souther

HD recording or the performance:

Eric Souther (South Bend, United States): Agentive Matter
  • duration: 15 min
  • watch: 9th February 2018 at 6 pm UTC

DESCRIPTION: Agentive Matter is a video and new media performance that explores the tension between material and symbolic communication. A database of one thousand images of historical artifacts are collected and mapped into a 3D superstructure that houses and forms these objects. During the performance, I grasp and bend this structure with a sensor that tracks my hand. Gestures of grasping or grouping mid-air morphs and bends the structure folding the images into one another creating new relationships, meanings, and matter. Through the form of aleatoric composition and improvisation, I am interested literally touching the unseen structures where language is both developed and dissolved, provoking a criticism concerning duality separating knowledge and being.

BIO: Eric Souther is a video and new media artist who draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, religion and critical theory. These investigations coalesce into works where ritual, materials, and technological assemblages form emergent systems. Work made with these systems arise from the dialog between myself and the codes that constitute our world. He looks for new ways of seeing beyond the seductive qualities of an image to find unseen pathways that help us understand our digital and non-digital existence. His work takes many pathways, which includes single-channel video, interactive installation, projection mapping, and audiovisual performance. ARTIST WEBSITE