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Arts Council England, South East AmbITion Roadshow
Friday 15
th
May, InQbate, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton
In the Flesh
5.15 – 6pm, Creativity Zone
The audience enter the darkened space wearing blue/red anaglyph 3d glasses. On reaching theirdesignated spot they are surprised to see a dancer on the ground in front of them. Although she is in fact aprojection she appears to be actually in the space, solid and real; she is there, in effect, ‘in the flesh’. At theend of her dance she fades into nothing.For the past four years Cowie has been developing a new form of stereoscopic 3d dance installationthat gives the viewers the impression that they are inhabiting the same space as the virtual performer(s)who appear solid and real. The works are scaleable to suit a wide variety of presentation situationsranging from half size ‘Alice in Wonderland’ type manifestations (using LCD monitors) to realistic life sizeprojections to enormous five or six times life size figures.In ‘In the Flesh’ using a ceiling mounted projector projecting down onto a white rectangle and 3Dspectacles, Cowie transforms a flattened, floor-based image into what he terms “a Specterfilm” as a femalefigure manifests herself, simultaneously solid and insubstantial, as a William Gibsonesque life-size virtualpresence, capable of reaching out towards the viewer. The pared down simplicity of this concept extends toa minimal soundtrack, consisting of piano and spoken word (available in English, German, French, Spanishand Italian), and to a slowly-paced and carefully considered movement vocabulary - as a hand reaches toconnect with an upwardly angled foot in an infant-like exploration of the limits of physical form. The workhas been presented more than 20 times throughout Europe and in the USA and won the Delegates Prize atthe 2007 IMZ Screen Festival in the Hague.
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