ALICE ANDERSON France, Great-Britain, b. 1972

For the past fifteen years, Anderson has been performing with the strength and intelligence of the body, alone and collectively, dancing with objects and spaces. These intuitive, gestural "Technological Dances," in which the performer poetically reactivates the strong link between the human and the nonhuman, give rise to immense paintings and sculptures, memorizing the objects and places of our Anthropocene era.

Anderson begins her performances by observing technological objects. She then ritually applies paint to these objects. Anderson does not paint with a brush, but directly with an object coated in paint. These computers, drones, batteries, virtual reality masks (etc...) then seize the artist, leading her into an intuitive dance punctuated by hyper-ventilated breaths that guide her into a trance, where, animated by repetitive movements, the objects generate points of impact on the canvas on the floor.

 

Striking the canvas creates a committed, poetic gesture. Striking the ground as a call, a request to open up to an animistic dimension of our environment and matter.

In Anderson's practice, technological objects memorized on canvas by paint are then assembled and crystallized by copper wire (a material symbolizing neural and technological connections) to become sculptures. Anderson speaks of crystallization or memorization to describe the gesture of encircling an object with wire. As she dialogues with the object, Anderson weaves, memorizes and crystallizes the relationship with it. These recycled machines embody ecological awareness and sacred divinities. Erected as "Spiritual Machines", they take their name from the 1999 book "The Age of the Spiritual Machines" by artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil.