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Charlotte Triebus
In collaboration with MIREVI
Performative JPEGs, prints and video with sound · Ongoing since 2023
A body can be recorded from every angle and still be hard to recognise. Triebus turns the flat images used to build avatars into large hanging portraits of choreographers.
A rig of up to 120 cameras records a body from many angles. During the making of an avatar, a developer would usually wrap the resulting image of the skin around a three-dimensional figure. Triebus stops one step earlier. She keeps the flat file, with its patches of hair, skin and clothing arranged according to the coordinates of a body that is no longer there.
Visitors walk between the hanging prints. An eye, a cheek or the fold of an elbow may be easy to recognise. To give those fragments a body that could move, each viewer has to imagine how they fit together. Triebus calls these portraits performative JPEGs.
Featurette
Away from keyboard
An online status normally marks a person’s absence from the keyboard. Triebus uses it for portraits made from a remarkable amount of bodily data. Someone standing in front of a print can examine the tiniest particulars of a stranger’s skin, yet struggle to recognise a person at all. Triebus is interested in what escapes the categories used to record bodies, including how non-binary identities can be represented.
In the gallery
Alongside the fabric prints, visitors can hear Triebus speak about the work in a short film shown on a screen mounted on glass. She also exhibits the portraits as JPEGs.
Selected exhibitions
Glitch in der Matrix, Kunstraum hase29, Osnabrück, 30 November 2024 – 1 February 2025. Works by Beate Gütschow and Charlotte Triebus. Curated by Wiebke Hahn and Jasmina Janoschka with curatorial assistance by Jaqui Maschke.
Further presentations include Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco.
Credits
- Artistic direction
- Charlotte Triebus
- 3D scanning
- 3d-people
- Development · MIREVI
- Christian-Norbert Zimmer, Marie Friedeheim
