Expanded Media

the gleaners, and: ritual for signaled bodies was created in December 2020 by a collaboration between Assistant Professor of Video Art Eric Souther and Associate Professor of Expanded Media Benjamin Rosenthal from the University of Kansas. You can see the trailer of the project below.

the gleaners, and: ritual for signaled bodies performs at the edges between body and the external, oscillating and eroding those boundaries. A ritual for creating new worlds and situations for fragmented bodies. Signals pass through the joints of animated and genderless bodies and body parts entangling the body-signal-actions both materially and conceptually as these control mechanisms interfere with pre-animated content. Perpetually shifting surfaces and skins serve as sites of projection and interference, contributing to the further “queering” of the state of these bodies and fragments that are stretched and submerged into and outside of the environment they inhabit, as they encounter desire, distress, and ritualized oscillations. Signals generate both sound and compels movement, the making of the images, and the body further challenges the stability and integrity of the space in its otherworldliness and the spatial relationships it establishes with the audience. At the edge between crisis and satisfaction, the work adopts the role of Millet’s own “gleaners,” making-do on the boundary between sustenance and the devoid.

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