when I am no longer vivid
my voice will enter the chamber
where my body cannot
and look upon its face
rendering creed and supplication
15:44 is a
cyberpunk liturgy to disembodiment and digital apparition. A collaboration
between digital artist Maisie Newman and poet and musician Rowan Evans, the
film combines poetry, 3D animation and original music and was first
commissioned by Mercy (Liverpool) and Penned in the Margins as a live
performance for the EVP
Sessions (November 2015). Developed in response to a fear of occupying
simulated spaces, encountering digital objects and the empty field beyond their periphery, 15:44 interrogates how
the live body interacts with digital structures that perform without an
identified user. Through the vocabulary of ritual, it causes an encounter
between the viewer and a technological system which draws them near to a ‘body
of light’.
Created with
Blender software, Newman’s animation uses geometric construction and shifting
textures to explore the dismantling and re-emergence of form, disorientating ‘our faith in a single plain’. The viewer
moves beyond the live body into the unknown dimensions of a
simulated space, encountering a digital apparition which responds to itself by continually
changing in form. We become conscious of the eventual performativity of this apparition
as it begins to
replicate – and learn from – an awareness within its technological environment,
separating the viewer from their physical location.
Simultaneous to this process, Evans’ poetry draws on
spatial theory, religious text and science fiction to create a lyric response
to fear and disembodiment in a virtual field. Spoken by two alternating voices,
the recitation of the poem forms vocal patterns abstracted from the body as
sound, yet sonically present in the space of the artwork. This recorded vocal trace parallels the video and its process and generates
a conscious presence of its own, as the voices feed into one another across the
stereo field. Music moves between ambient drone, post-rock guitars and minimal
electronic composition, interacting with the voices and underscoring and
amplifying the images.
place of origin, a vantage / uttered from or sending trace /
shudders through manipulated light / white-out / to expand in absolute context
