The current VRAL show features Amir Yatziv’s groundbreaking work Kingdom of Shadows, a multimedia project focusing on an unusual audition: an actress (Neta Shpigelman) is trying to win the part of a computer game character in a successful series, Final Fantasy. The setup is both spartan and dense.
Her performance is evaluated by a famous Japanese computer game director, played by Eliya Tsuchida. Several avatars are auditioned for this role, which requires them to repeatedly cross the thin line that separates reality from fiction, until it completely disappears. A conceptual tour de force, Kingdom of Shadows is also a remarkable technical feat: the human actor is wearing a motion-capture suit on stage that captures her movements and facial expressions and instantly translates them into those of her digital counterpart on a giant screen, who is perceived, by the viewers, as the “real” actor. Her acting thus is simultaneously captured and translated by way of performance-capture technology. We see extreme closeups, weird angles, abrupt moves, and funny gestures, although we are perfectly aware that something is lost, including the fact that Shpigelman — gesticulating onstage in her black bodysuit — is extremely pregnant.
Kingdom of Shadows is a meditation on the proliferation of doppelgängers, replicas, and avatars in contemporary culture, a theme that also recurs in Yatziv’s latest project, Non Player Character (2021). However, it is not a warning about replacement, extinction or body snatching. On the contrary, the artist sees the avatar as a synthesis of the human and the post-human.
the avatar [embodies] the best of the human and the best of the machine. This is something new for me, but I look at this work as an experiment. What I am trying to do is to combine the strengths of these two agents, the machine and the human being. (Amir Yatziv)
At the same time, the work seems to suggest that any attempts to reach a “solid” emotional connection between the parties involved, suggesting that technologically mediated social distancing today is a prerequisite for professional success and, perhaps, even for emotional survival.
Interestingly, Kingdom of Shadows has been presented under various guises. The current VRAL show features a recording of the live animation performance that took place at the Jerusalem Theater during the Israeli Festival in June 2021, but there’s an additional performance that took place at Artport Tel Aviv 2021 on July 7 2021 which adds new elements, including a new epilogue and a completely different coda. The artist is considering more iterations. In that sense, Kingdom of Shadows is not a single text, but like a video game, is many different texts at once, many possible worlds, an incubator of fantasies.
Matteo Bittanti
