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Sabine Gruffat
Sabine Gruffat is an artist who works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new tools, crossing analog and digital signals, or repurposing old machines to patch into new ones. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions standardized ways of understanding the world around us. She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and Migrating Forms in New York. Her feature film I Have Always Been A Dreamer has screened internationally including at the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has also produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York. Currently she is Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Role: visuals
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art
Moving or Being Moved
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers. In this gaming/ special effects world, movement has become a data set removed from the human body. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without embodiment? How does mood and emotion influence movement?
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art
AntiBodies
This work engages with the ways video games represent (and misrepresent) the female body. The avatars in AntiBodies are pro-Anorexic yogis, cyber-Hysterics, and rubber-boned ragdolls. These young ladies are Frankenstein-like ready-mades concocted from a vast library of modular assets shared and created by the video game community. These assets can be transformed easily to fit within any video game, a treasure trove that makes video game developing cheaper, faster, and easier. I hack presets: characters, voices, motion capture data, and scripts. I remix the digital bones, the elastic skins, and electronic musculature. In this world, body dysmorphia is an artificial intelligence deciding how the body moves, collides, and interferes with others.