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Strokes
Presented by Centre for Projection Art
“Strokes” is a moving image work by Annika Koops that explores how the corporeal and personal are distilled into data through the capture and codification of human motion. The work utilises Computer Generated Imagery, digital video, motion Capture and AI to draw links between animation (the practice of imparting motive vitality to the inert) and automation (the machinic replacement of tasks previously performed by humans).
The work revolves around a central femme figure dressed in chromakey blue. She performs gestures driven by a grab-bag of expressive actions: dancing, painting, rhythmic gymnastics, movement taken from TikTok videos, and vintage footage from live-action animation studios at Disney. The work troubles concepts of authorship by staging encounters between the authorial mark and anonymised labour. By picking apart the implications of the invisible, and often gendered and racialised human labour that props up the illusion of efficient, lively, autonomous technological agents, Annika seeks to question whose traces are made visible and whose are simply woven into its support structures.
Credits
Artist: Annika Koops
Image credit: “Strokes” (2022), Annika Koops. Photo courtesy of the artist.
View Artist Biographies
Annika Koops is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist working between painting and moving image. Her works consider how subjectivity is distilled and reformatted in the digital realm. Current work contrasts imaging technologies associated with biometrics with painterly practice to interpret how bodily traces operate in cultural and economic fields. Annika has exhibited nationally and internationally at a variety of public institutions, ARI’s, and private galleries. Her works are included in significant Australian public collections such as Art Bank, MONA Hobart and The University of Melbourne Collection. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart. She is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University.
Partners
Commissioned and presented by Centre for Projection Art. Body-Cites is generously supported by Creative Victoria.