Infected is a film about the nature of the physical body in the context of future technological possibilities, seen through dance and digitally manipulated imagery. The new bio-engineered body is still a sexual, stark, brutal, organic, pounding bloody system with ripping tendons. It is beautiful and repulsive, indulgent, curious, emotional, un/controlled, breeding, changing…
Infected begins in darkness; a small streak of light expands into a series of more complex shapes, eventually revealing itself as the body of a dancer. Confined within a circular projection screen the dancer moves with the distracted, disorientated impatience of a caged animal. As the film progresses, the image is manipulated until flesh takes on an almost liquid appearance. The figure stutters, jumps, blurs, is broken. We observe this image corruption as if by electronic interference. The deformation of the image is analogous to the descent of this once controlled body into trauma. There is something of the tortured, hallucinatory figures and distraught sexuality of Francis Bacon haunting this work, destined to repeat its infection in perpetuity. Is this a futuristic vision of the human body infiltrated and changed, 'infected' by biotechnology, or is the reverse happening? Is the human body, the warm-blooded body of sinews and emotions, corrupting the "pure light" of technology?
Czarnecki has exhibited her films and installations widely across the UK and around the world. Infected continues her enquiry into the visceral, biological, emotive body and its politics in relation to new technologies.
Infected features Scottish dance artist, Iona Kewney, and a specially commissioned score by Fennesz, whose computer-manipulations of sounds derived from guitar and other acoustic sources have won him worldwide acclaim as one of the most innovative and important artists in electronic music.
21 Oct - 27 Nov 05 | Motion at the Edge | The Assembly Rooms, Long Buckby, UK
Produced by Forma
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