8_MEDIA ART Intruders - 8_MEDIA ART Intruders
INTRUDER[S]
Videoart
The work shows a woman running through the streets of a city. But we noticed that it doesn't move. Your effort is in vain. We see a hand that tries to order, another that tries to stop her, then another that tries to touch her and the last, more violent, threatening. At first we see that the woman is unable to run, but we don't know why. Only later do we see the hands and understand the boycott she is suffering. It is inspired by the story of Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon, in 1967. Upon realizing that there was a woman on the track, the race director, Jock Semple, tried to expel her and asked: "What are you Are you trying to prove it?” to which she replied, “I was just trying to run.” The image of Switzer being pushed is extremely violent and even though she fortunately managed to finish the marathon, you imagine her emotional state during and after the race. . «Intruder[s]» reflects not only this event, but all those in which women were accused of invading so-called exclusively male places and had their bodies invaded by male hands, whether in the world of sports, at work or in everyday life.
Concept
The female body as an object, available to be touched, manipulated by male hands, goes beyond the racetrack. In the world of sport, reports of harassment have come to light, which for many years was normalized. Who are the intruders? Women, in a place completely dominated by men? Or the male hands, which invade female bodies? This title also refers to horror films, in which the female image is quite stereotypical.Intrusive are also the voices that insist on wanting to dictate who can do what.
Kathrine Switzer
In 1967, Katherine Switzer dared to sign up to run the Boston Marathon. At the time, women's participation in the marathon was not prohibited, but there was a belief that they were too fragile to withstand running the 42,195 meters. Yet Katherine signed up using the initials K. V. Switzer. When he was in the third kilometer, the race commander, Jock Semple, noticed the movement of photographers, eager to record the moment. He invaded the track and pushed her, ordering her to abandon the race. But she didn't give in and kept running, managing to complete the race in 4 hours and 20 minutes. In 1972, the women's category was created and made official at the Boston Marathon.In 1974, Kathrine Switzer won the New York Marathon in 3:07:29. In 1975 he came second in the Boston Marathon, with a time of 2h51min37s. In 2018, 11,628 women completed the Boston Marathon.
Technology
Using free images from image banks available on the internet, artificial intelligence was used to create a video game atmosphere.Subsequently, the assembly and finalization were carried out, with the insertion of hands, also generated by artificial intelligence and applied manually, frame by frame.
Inspirations
"I was inspired by photomontages, a genre in which two or more photographic images are juxtapose on the same visual plane, causing a semantic fusion. It was consolidated in the 1920s, with the Dadaist movement. One of the pioneers in the use of this technique was Hannah Höch, whose works questioned the aesthetic standards of the time and the position of women in society.In the film The Hand (Ruka), by Jirí Trnka (2003), a potter who produces vases in his own home sees a hand invade his space and give him orders, in the author's fierce criticism of the totalitarian regime in which he lived, in Czechoslovakia in 1965. In the dance show Sur un Fil (By a Thread), by Claire Théault and Anthony Figueiredo, hands represent thoughts and emotions. The video game aesthetic reinforces the idea of objectification of the female body, seen here as a piece that serves the game, at the mercy of hands that can do anything.”
ARTIST BIO
Cristina Cavalcanti is a digital artist, web designer, director and actress, founder of the award-winning Visceral Theater Company. PhD student in Digital Media-Art at the University of Algarve (UAlg) and Open University of Portugal (UAb), graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Paraná and in Theater from the Institute of Arts and Sciences of São Paulo - Brazil. She is a researcher at the Center for Research in Arts and Communication (CIAC) and collaborates with the Research and Shared Creation Laboratory: Cinema and Other Moving Images, at the University of Beira Interior. Investigates archive, montage and image. As head of Jiboia Estúdio, he created the visual identity of several films and theatrical shows, as well as graphic pieces for companies. He is responsible for the creation, execution and maintenance of web pages in Brazil, Portugal, France and Spain. As a digital artist, he has explored the use of archives in digital media art, creating multimedia installations with sensors and artificial intelligence. Her provocative works talk about sustainability, necropolitics, feminism. She is interested in violent representations of the female body, gender expressions, neuro divergences and everything that deviates from normativity.
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