The dancers, agentically choosing the time and location of their recording sessions, composed moments to consider privacy, solitude, and secrecy. Instead of being on display in front of the camera, the dancers are performing for and with themselves.The kaleidoscopic placement of the pop-up windows, however, insists on the viewer’s access to the entirety of their screens, exploring simultaneously the intensely singular and plural aspects of the dancers’ performances.
Artists Sabrina Bennette, Desmond Cadogan, Meredith Fages, Jillian Hollis, Donald Lee, Claude-Andrée Louissaint, and Sora Sol recorded dances for the camera. The resultantly mediated bodies are distributed across a desktop screen in carefully choreographed patterns, a formal variating designed collaboratively by Man and Latsky.
The dancer’s photos are culled from past live performances, but the video clips triggered by interaction showcase each dancer moving in private while in their own home or neighborhood. Viewers navigate the work at their own pace, and in their own chosen order. With over fifteen unique pop up window experiences to discover (and at least three per dancer), the piece is never exactly the same twice.
Recessed runs on custom software developed by Man, which gave the artists full choreographic control over various aspects of the pop up windows including their size, location, transitions, and timing. Throughout their collaboration, Man and Latsky considered footage sent over by the dancer and discussed how specific sections of a clip might be staged. Together, they worked to develop a distinct point of view for each dancer. The production process involved both choreographic and video-editing techniques, with both Man and Latsky enacting creative decisions pertaining to timing, transitions, and placement so as to maximize the emotional power of each performer.
Recessed is in conversation with other artists’ work in the genres of Post-Internet Art, Movement and Computation, and Desktop Cinema. It seeks to re-mix and re-kindle browser-based explorations of the early 2000s (for example, the web marketing campaign for the 2000 film Requiem for a Dream) with an emphasis on contemporary considerations of embodiment, ability, intersectionality and performance.