Active Images: Re-staging Liveliness in Moving Image and Painting

‘Active Images’ connects contemporary imaging technologies with painterly practice to explore the aesthetic and conceptual registers of 'liveliness'. This research is realised through contemporary moving image practice, painting, and animation and employs mime's tragicomic vocabulary as a critical framework for complicating the mimetic function of digital technology. By examining how technologies capture and encode human movement, the work questions the mimetic capabilities of both digital and painterly methods, exploring the complex relationship between embodied gestures and the algorithmic systems that shape them. Studio methods deliberately re-stage human movement to highlight the extractive processes through which gestures are abstracted from embodied contexts and codified within vast datasets.<p></p>