[finally uploading this after finding it hard to post on streaming services due to music copyright]
this was a duo act myles and i put together during the pandemic for a virtual show called “e-go”, which was one of pseuda’s projects during their curatorial residency at counterpulse and ultimately streamed as a special presentation by princess (a drag night at oasis).
we knew from the outset that it would be streamed virtually and choreographed it as such — mid-pandemic i had approached myles asking if he wanted to collaborate on a duo piece where we played with a nontraditional concept of being unable to occupy the same space.
for this piece we wanted a narrative that showed traditional duo work, which then fractured into separate overlaid solos that were composed in relation to each other, and then a rejoining of time and space for the final scene.
since the topic of the show was about digital identity, i wanted to play with anonymization and obfuscation of both myles’ and my bodies individually (something i think happens in duo work frequently as the audience might mistake one person for the other) and the audience’s recognition of our bodies as objects of surveillance (especially given the digital capture of what is classically an ephemeral live performance). i incorporated anti-facial-recognition makeup in the costuming design and wanted to add an overlaid visualization to the performance in the form of a human detection algorithm.
i initially was going to implement something extremely simple, but we were lucky enough to have faited implement a pose estimation algorithm called densepose. the result is a hybrid of traditional performance video and the visualized forms from densepose, which almost perfectly detects myles’ and my bodies despite us being in extremely unusual positions for what it was trained on.
