Multimedia Enhanced Performance Art by Norman Magden - Photographed by GX Media
norman magden artist statement
My works involve the creation of multi-image performances in which live performers/dancers move in an integrated environment of projected images. The live performers interact with the projected images by carrying portable screens as an extension of their performance persona or by wearing specially designed reflective costumes, allowing their own bodies to become screens. The portable screen surfaces include variously formed white shapes that can be extended away from the body or passed over the body in continuous motion causing the images to appear three-dimensional, as they seem to come forward or recede.
Because the performance takes place without andy stage lighting, the projections provide the only illumination. The performers' actions only become visible when the portable screens or the white costumes interject the projection beams. In some works, the screens and the costumes have a black side upon which the images will not appear, adding to illusions in which there are no precise divisions between the real and the projected performance. Live performers acting as screens become a metaphor for the polemical human struggle between the beauty and terror of technology and its ever increasing presence in contemporary society.
To push the dissolution of boundaries between realities even further, the images being projected on the performers often contain a reiteration of the performance actually taking place, creating an intriguing visual confusion in which it becomes almost impossible to separate the images of the performance from the live performance. These multi-image environments are not designed to be mere stage scenery, but created as extensions of the living energy in the movement and the sounds of the actual performance.
