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Figures Crawling – Rebecca Allen
Rebecca Allen is an internationally recognized artist whose work takes the form of both VR and AR art installations, experimental video and large-scale performances. Her practise spans nearly four decades and embraces the worlds of fine art, performing arts, pop culture and technology research.
For Synthetic Corpo-Reality, Ms. Allen is exhibiting two videos from the series called Figures In Motion (Figure Crawling and Figure Waiting) which she created as a response to a lifelong interest of bodies in motion. In fact when Ed Catmull made the first female avatar in 1972, Rebecca brought her to life in 1980- 81 as they were developing one of the first 3D animation systems.
To create Figures In Motion Ms. Allen worked with a male and female model and had them crawl on the ground. She captured their movement from a camera mounted overhead. The bodies in the videos are genderless, with a plastic look of the skin as the figures crawls in front of us. The camera’s focus is on the skin making it sometimes into an abstract form as the artist concentrates on more formal concerns in art like color, form, and composition. As Ms. Allen says,”Human forms appear as otherworldly, fluid abstractions. Their intricate, undulating, compelling and at times disturbing movements are realistic and unaltered. The narrative is stripped to the raw perception of movement, drawing from our deep familiarity and visceral response to human motion”.
