Presence

Commissioned by Inter Media Art Institute, Düsseldorf (DE), and presented as part of Video Digest at Moltkerei Werkstatt, Köln (DE). Curated by Nele Kaczmarek.

Presence began as a text focusing on a special effect in film known as “twinning,” when the same actor appears on screen twice at the same time, as a model for the virtualization of much social interaction and new, posthuman concepts of subjectivity. These themes were developed over a series of short letters I wrote, each addressed to the "editor," a reference to the letters to the editor page of many magazines and newspapers. The publication also included film stills from relevant examples of “twinning” from films such as Dead Ringers (1988), The Parent Trap (1999), Us (2019) and Dead Ringers (2023), and and was designed by David Bennewith. The sculpture that presented Presence in the context of Video Digest simulated a fragment of domestic architecture as an extension of my exhibition Sitcom Architecture, extending the "set" into another location, reproducing the fragmentation of the filming process across different exhibition sites.

Presence was performed for the opening of the exhibition in a way that questioned what a "live" performance might be. Rather than reading the text myself, a recording of Presence was played from two synchronized portable speakers carried by a set of identical twins throughout the exhibition space. As the text questions what constitutes living “presence” (and therefore absence), it was important to perform the text in a similarly uncanny way: a “live” event without a live reader, animating the disembodied speaker. In addition to my voice, Joscha Steffens recorded a German "translation" of part of the text. Presence was performed by Cologne-based twins and filmmakers Stefan and Benjamin Ramírez Pérez.