Eleanor Jones
AI in Arcadia, 2016
This was a two-part work presented in a performance lecture and a double screen video installation.
The performance lecture addresses the vulnerability of the artist’s body and the performance of proving one’s “body of work” to the judge of an audience, in this case an examination context. She attempted to deconstruct the constraints of an artist’s presentation, with silent performance, narrative, and critical analysis. Without voice, the body of the artist acts as a semantic channel with which the audience are forced to engage in decoding meaning throughout the presentation. This plays on the abstraction and reification of social media and the decoupling of personality from embodiment in the digital age.
The double screen video installation explores the resonances of decaying places as transitions from place to non-place, and through historicity from materiality to immateriality, countered by a representation of the obligations of the body through demonstrative physicality. The body maintains its own discussion of reality, juxtaposing with a simultaneous expansion of hyper-reality. AI is a definition of the functional cybernetic cycle of existence-non-existence-existence.. Such as – borders that simultaneously exist and do not exist. In conversation with the performance the artist’s body and voice is used to portray the narrative.
Born in Sheffield, England in 1986, Eleanor studied a Bachelors in Fine Art Critical Practice at The University of Brighton followed by an MA in Interactive Media & Critical Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. She has just completed her Absolvent in Art & Media at the The Universität der Künste Berlin.
