Live Audiovisual Performance
Year: 2013/2015
Authors: Paloma Oliveira and Mateus Knelsen
Exhibited in: 2013 SP Urban Digital Festival and FILE 2015

Monomyth is a multimedia performance in which a performer (Paloma Oliveira) crosses a public space wearing an apparatus that “hijacks” faces of those who come across, making the performer assume these faces, in a continuous transformation of identities. The performer carries a system that can identify human faces through a camera — positioned in a support on the performer’s head, pointed directly to wherever the performer is looking — and a special pattern recognition software. When the system recognises a face, it records a video of it. These videos are stored in a database. From this database, this same software recalls these videos continuously, according to certain parameters taken from facial expressions detected. This faces are then projected on the face of the performer (covered by a white mask that serves as support for the projection) and simultaneously projected on another auxiliary screen, so that those who are passing by can look the images on a larger scale.

The performance references the theory present in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, in which the myths of heroes compose a single “hero archetype”. The piece creates a situation in which the hero/performer wanders through a public space, while appropriating the most intimate aspect of a person — the face — , but nevertheless, not being able to define his own. The hero in Monomyth is not only a flaneur, he is the wandering itself; he is both wanderer and the crossed path.

The system developed for Monomyth externalises the conflict of the hero, capturing the faces of nearby people and projecting them on the performer’s face in a continuous metamorphosis. The faces tell a particular narrative, whose narrator is both the performer and the software.

Monomyth was presented at the 2nd SPUrban Digital Festival, during the period of November 4th – 28th, at the SESI Gallery of Digital Art, 1313 Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, Brazil; and at the FILE (International Electronic Language Festival), also in São Paulo, in July 2015.

“Monomyth” is how Joseph Campbell called his theory in which the “hero” is an archetype that accompanies humanity through stories, mythologies and of history itself.

The hero is a figure that is repeated in eternal cycles and their rites of passage are ways of transmitting moral values ​​and customs responsible for the perpetuation of this knowledge in different cultures and times. The heroic act is a transformation in which the protagonist leaves his place of comfort, plunging into the unknown and returns as the bearer of morality.

Since oral culture, through literature and then by audio-visual media, the figure of the hero remains that icon, the result of a collective longing to fill certain gaps in the human experience.

More contemporarily, the media platforms use the Avatar figure like this archetype that invites participation in the contemporary myth of the “global village”.

In networks under Avatar masks, we seek to be “heroes”, transform ourselves, we others. These media provide the different ways of “being” with others: a “non-presence”, one “not be” ubiquitous, no time. In networks we are always trying to “outredades” being followed, monitoring, sharing, others. We treat there archetypes of “I” collective.

When we return to the physical plane, the very own experiences of these digital spaces in his revelations, exchanges and moralism, return in the form of memories and experiences, make our physical interpersonal relations are others.

E is through Monomyth, this wearable performative object, which in travestimos of others, we become someone else . Je suis d’autre, already pronounced Rimbaud.

Monomyth consists of a hat, a mask, a camera, a video projector and a computer. The camera captures the image of people. This image is processed by the computer through a face recognition software which cuts out and sends them to a database. These faces are then video-mapped and video projected on the performer’s face using a translucent mask, support for the projection. Both the camera and the video-projector are located on the hat.

When exposed in the gallery, the object is placed on a dummy and is a static avatar that continues capturing and projecting faces.

When worn by the performer, the other becomes me and I become the other. The performer becomes a “hero” enclosed in a constant process of transfiguration. He walks the environment by capturing and projecting images of people in his own face, alluding to these processes of virtual and interpersonal relationships in the same artistic performance plan.

SP Urban Version

A version being developed especially for the SPURBAN proposes further strengthen relations between heroes-avatars, urban space and virtual.

The performer walks down the Avenue Paulista camouflaged with their social robes and his executive folder, intensionando get lost in the crowd. But the very light projector on his face betrays a there be constantly changing.
The mutation occurs, however, only when starting a relationship of affection, commitment, eye to eye, when the bolt is allowed to divert their trajectory in order to have this moment of exchange with someone else. Here comes the work of this meeting between passer and performer. And it is from this meeting that happens to work.

The passing of the image is appropriate for the performer, designed in his face and simultaneously sent the four screens available in space. The “through-interactor-avatar” becomes in the multiplicity of time and space: the FIESP panel and other panels 3 the ramps at Alameda das Flores.

Each new image is inserted into a database that is triggered randomly between the spaces of no interaction.