Shana Moulton’s Meta/Physical Therapy

You’ve made a point of using lo-fi tools and effects (early on, you used a green screen set up in your apartment). How has Cynthia’s universe evolved with changing technologies? Or, to what extent do you want it to remain consistent?

​​I am still mourning the loss of the 4:3 television aspect ratio. Working in this ratio reinforced the work’s connection to television vs. film, but when TV went hi-res and 16:9, I felt the need to upgrade my aspect ratio and resolution as well. Learning Adobe After Effects was really empowering for me as an art student, and I still rely on the 2D animation basics like masking to cut shapes out and collage layers of video. I’ve been ambivalent about AI and have not hit on a system for generating imagery that works for me. The psychedelic dogs and snails of Google Deep Dream circa 2015 is still my favorite AI aesthetic and I did use that for a brief moment in Whispering Pines 10. But I recently realized that AI also has the ability to interpolate or morph two or more images, and that has become a major motif in this new work.

Could you tell us more about your use of negative space and cut-out images?

I think I once heard the great psychedelic light show artist Joshua Light say that, when you have the opportunity to project something, why stay within the 16:9 rectangle? I also like to make rectangular videos that are in relation to film or television and can be watched on screens, but when I have the chance to make an immersive environment with multiple projections, I love to fill the space with free-floating shapes. I am a big fan of the way Pipilotti Rist and Tony Oursler have used irregular shapes and sculptural projection supports, and it surprises me that I don’t see it all the time!

Your new installation centers on three large video sculptures; can you speak a bit about their forms, and some of your sources of inspiration for these?

When I was first composing Cynthia’s domestic space I wanted it to feel like “a room of one’s own,” or like a cross between a home office and an exercise room. I imagined it from one angle and I also wanted it to feel flat and claustrophobic, so the center form in the main projection is bell-jar shaped. I added two side panels so that the entire shape replicated a giant vanity mirror. The vase is a motif in the video and making it into a video sculpture with a hidden staircase allows me to gain height in the performance. And the stair-step sculpture is based on a toy I had as a kid called Penguin Race, where a penguin endlessly climbs motorized steps and then slides back down the the bottom of the steps on a curved path. The river path on the floor is part of that curved path as well as an assembly line or supply stream that connects all of these structures. It was originally inspired by The Mysterious Baths Fountain by Giorgio de Chirico (although it ended up looking more like the stage river in Taylor Swift’s latest tour). I was thinking about de Chirico because the campus where I teach (and where I shot some of the video), at UC Santa Barbara, looks like one of his Surrealist cityscapes.

This work explores, among other topics, the performative and ritualistic qualities of physical therapy. What led you to focus on physical therapy in particular?

I’ve been getting a lot of physical therapy for osteoarthritis in my hip, and this (alongside cortisone or platelet-rich plasma shots) is the last line of defense before hip replacement surgery. The exercises feel like a prayer for preventing or delaying surgery and restoring full mobility. While I visit the physical therapist I am given a new exercise or “movement” at each visit. I’m not sure why they don’t just give me all of the exercises at once, but receiving them one at a time made them feel somewhat mystical.

One of my favorite things is when Cynthia steps outside of herself, or when her body blends with another entities—such as a game of Operation in The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column (2021), or a clay pot in The Galactic Pot Healer (2010). In Meta/Physical Therapy, at times we see two Cynthias. Is this the most explicit you’ve been about using this kind of doubling?

Thinking back, I have worked with two Cynthias in a live performance at a LMCC [Lower Manhattan Cultural Council] event. The fabulous artist, singer, and now esteemed filmmaker Rachel Mason played the other Cynthia during this performance and I believe she even sang a song as Cynthia. I have also performed live with a projection of Cynthia, but I do think this is the first time I’ve doubled Cynthia in the video. I feel like this is an extension of what I was first interested in as a performance artist—this idea of testing the body’s limits. When I realized I could use layering, masking, or distortion effects to push, composite, and sculpt my body in video, I decided that I preferred that to testing my body’s boundaries in live performance. And it’s another way to express the psychic toll that all of these modern products and predicaments are having on Cynthia (or me).

The live performance you’re creating in collaboration with Nick takes the form of a medical ritual, in which a team of care providers guides her beyond the material realm. Can you tell us more about this place? What does it look (or sound) like?

Nick came up with the idea of “bowing” Cynthia’s body, as you would bow a vibraphone, in order to tune both her body and the universe. The higher state of consciousness she achieves through tuning is our attempt to visualize what healing through sound looks like, and it is inspired both by past examples (in the form of theosophist artists or modern artists that gave visual form to sound and spirituality) like Vasily Kandinsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbetter, and Hilma af Klint, and more contemporary examples of how the body has been “improved” by cyborgian technology.

In your live performances you interact with video projections, often appearing to move objects around in space as one would interact with images on an iPhone; early on, you were inspired by the way Tom Cruise interacts with holograms in Minority Report. How has your practice of interacting with video images changed over time?

Early on, I was influenced by brilliant projection-performances like The Swan Tool by Miranda July, Prune Flat by Robert Whitman, and Joan Jonas’s projection performances. I realized that a large enough video projection could be a set that I could bring anywhere, and that there were endless possibilities for how a live body could interact with a projected set. After spending more time with projectors in video installations, I realized that I could play with how the projection landed on my body, or project a small, handheld projection into a large projection, or into my own shadow within a larger projection. And a lot of those realizations came from happy accidents.