Starring Ashley Harris, Stephen Shearer & Tucker Bennett
The Body Electric is a two channel video projection.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the public’s enchantment with electricity had already lasted for many years and it was viewed as a mysterious and magical, if cursed phenomena.
This project focuses on the supernatural discourses that surrounded electricity and its harnessing via technologies of communication, extending the idea that it could connect people at a distance (via the telegraph or later, via radio) to connecting humanity to other worlds, realms, or in the case of this video, times.
Envisioned as a piece of science fiction, the two videos in this installation “talk” to one another across space, connecting the characters (a telegraph operator from the 1890s and an adolescent ham radio operator from the nineteen-teens) in their separately gendered and technologized environments.
This project is accompanied by a series of hand drawn illustrations and posters that further represent the themes of this project.
