The more ordinary, the more illusory
2023
Installation presenting the interactive "real time" performance made up of 2 video-projections reproducing the moving image, seen by the spectator/camera in the real world and seen by a camera in the virtual world. (Technology: Rokoko motion capture system/Unreal Engine)


Produced by le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains

« If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. »
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Research

In this performative project, a performer moves in response to her own movements as they are projected within a virtual environment. On the wall, her garment appears without a body, floating like a ghost inside a computer-generated domestic space. Connected to the motion-capture suit worn by the performer in the exhibition space, this virtual garment moves with her, yet seems to lead her at the same time. The work stages a feedback loop between a living body and its projected double. The performer tries to align herself with the image on the wall, as if she needed this image in order to orient herself, act, and exist. Her gestures are shaped by the virtual domestic space, while her physical movements also affect the behavior of the virtual objects. What emerges is not a simple opposition between real and virtual, but a fragile system of mutual dependence in which body and image continuously train one another. The domestic space, usually associated with intimacy and familiarity, becomes here a symbolic environment shaped by invisible cultural rules. It is a space of habit, but also of discipline. As the performer adapts her body to a space that is constantly transforming, the work reveals how perception, behavior, and identity are learned through the structures we inhabit. The virtual image is not presented as an escape from reality, but as one of the frameworks through which reality becomes legible. The most ordinary gestures reveal their illusory nature. They appear no longer as natural movements, but as actions shaped by repetition, technology, and social codes. In this shifting choreography, the work asks how much of what we call our own movement has already been shaped by the images, habits, and rules we have learned to inhabit.



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