a pixelated form of a hand is in the foreground in bright yellow and orange. It is set against a grey checkered background and to its left are an assortment of individual pixels in bright red. Tinges of blue appear throughout the image.
Image still from Dematerialise by Vishal Kumaraswamy

As an artist working with experimental technologies, hacking/re-purposing tools to create artistic works I’m often looking for ways in which I can create intimate shared experiences. Even before the pandemic, a lot of my practice was being conducted solely through computer based interactions due to a lack of funding and other resources. This mode of working allowed me to focus my practice towards making accessible works and I began thinking about the language, technology and context accessibility of my works within a larger contemporary art conversation.

Kathe (Story) is conceived as a networked performance, seeking to subvert the productivity focused features of video-conference platforms to perform gestures of intimacy and community. It occurs as a mediated experience through oral storytelling, poetry and real-time video programming. The work centers the danger of surveillance capitalism for the entirety of the performance by never rendering a ‘clean image’ of the narrator and instead offering an abstract assemblage of pixels in space. This distortion occurs as a series of off-screen choreographed processes even as the audience is asked to be conscious about turning their cameras & microphones on and off throughout the performance.
Dematerialise is the work in progress film version of this performance.

Kathe was a way of thinking about the disintegration of the image occurring in real-time within a remotely presented performance and looking at how this real-time manipulation of the image retains artistic integrity while speaking to specific parts of my research.

Excerpt from Dematerialise by Vishal Kumaraswamy

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