AN artist explores our relationship with digital versions of ourselves in an exhibition which opens this weekend at Glasgow’s CCA.
Today at 3pm, Jeanne Tullen will begin the first of a series of daily performances at the arts centre, which is hosting the Swiss photographer’s first solo exhibition following her graduation from the Glasgow School of Art’s internationally renowned Master of Fine Art programme in 2018.
In Transit sees Tullen use her physical body to interact with animated images of herself beamed from four screens in the gallery.
Wearing a plain, all-covering leotard in a hue often matching her skin tone, Tullen will merge and mutate with the Gifs in an attempt to “find a version of herself at the intersection between the virtual and the real”.
Her costume evokes a blank digital avatar, waiting to be personalised ahead of a computer game.
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“There was definitely some of that avatar thinking in the decision to wear this,” says Tullen. “It’s a bit off; it looks like I’m naked but I’m not. It’s close to my body but it’s not sexy. It’s almost as if I become a figure displaced from physical reality.”
That displacement, that in-betweenness, is central to her performative installation, Tullen says.
“The title In Transit is about the constant transition between the digital world and the physical world,” she says. “In the installation itself are three yoga mats, two of which have the screens. One is left empty and I will lie on it during the performances.
“I become another object, another element in the installation. It’s a passive performance for about an hour where I place my body by the screens, to recompose it. I am a physical whole, or I become whole with the fragments.”
Tullen continues: “When I am gone, the mat is empty. You know something is missing, like the digital and physical cannot be complete without the other.”
Tullen, who will take versions of In Transit to Paris photography festival Circulations and the Glasgow International this spring, says her playful, often provocative work is partly informed by a childhood love for popular noughties life simulation game The Sims and how generational divides highlight how much of younger peoples’ sense of identity relates to the digital world.
Electronic versions of ourselves demand constant updating, filtering and shaping, says the 30-year-old.
“I was almost going to call it a ‘ghost’, this version of ourselves,” says Tullen. “It makes me think of my relationship with my phone. I realise that when I was by myself a lot, I would even take my phone to the bathroom, just to have it with me, to have a sense that the loneliness was less real.”
Until January 30 (not Mondays), CCA, Glasgow, noon to 6pm, free. Performances Thursday and Friday, 1.30pm, Saturday and Sunday, 3pm, free. Tel: 0141 352 4900.
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