System of Touch
MV Brown ‘System of Touch’
3D Assistance & Lighting: Saturn Akin
Sound Production & Engineering: Craig Mulholland
Costume Design: Morag Seaton digitised by Fashion Interrupted (Emma Clifton, Gillian Martin, and Ciorstaidh Monk)
System of Touch centres a CGI animated avatar of the artist, created through 3D scanning and motion capture technology, performing a mashup of popular karaoke tracks that also reference the artist’s queerness. The vocals are generated using AI to clone their voice, resulting in a song that feels at once familiar and bizarre, incorporating moments of glitch and slip to amplify the mechanics at work. By using the framework of a karaoke performance, the work employs tactics of universality to speak to a human search for connection and the ways in which we project ourselves onto one another, whilst simultaneously speaking to the (im)possibility of intercorporeal intersubjectivity with ‘false’ avatars. In karaoke we are engaged as a performer, articulating and expressing our own identity through another’s song: but what are we mirroring? What is at play, when authorship and representation are disrupted or rendered through computer generation? These themes were further layered through their performative presence at the exhibition openings in an outfit matching that of their avatar. The video is acompanied by a rotating 3D-printed disco ball head, adding a camp theatricality to the work.
Comissioned by Jerwood Survey III 2023-25
Touring Exhibition: Southwark Park Galleries (London), g39 (Cardiff), Site Gallery (Sheffield), Collective (Edinburgh)
Documentation by Rita Silva, Dan Weil, Jules Lister and Eoin Carey.
Video available to view upon request
Catalogue Text by Susan Finlay
