Nina Davies: Contacting Image Worlds

Contacting Image Worlds extends Nina Davies’ solo exhibition Image Syncers, which centres on a new video narrated through an episode of a invented podcast What’s Sizzlin’. In the episode, investigative journalist Teagan Carroll recounts her first encounter with an Image Syncer community at the Trio Comms Hall; a moment the live performance restages.

Upon arrival, guests are invited to explore the exhibition in Western Front's gallery, watch the video, and familiarize themselves with the Image Syncers and the world they inhabit. Upstairs, a Twitch-style livestream plays at the entrance to the performance space, the Grand Luxe Hall, featuring a workplace vlogger from Wifi Vision—a company selling movement-data packages for humanoid devices—who hosts a wager on whether a customer is “a bot or not.” The customer has called to report a glitch in their movement-data bundle, and when asked whether the training data is sourced from the real world, the streamer discovers that it is—and that the movements captured belong to the Image Syncers, a group who mimic AI-generated gestures from synthetic videos. As the video unfolds, the streamer realizes that the customer is, in fact, a fully autonomous bot. Since the ultimate aim of Image Syncers is to connect with AI worlds, the streamer—an Image Syncer themself—recognizes this moment as a long-awaited point of contact and invites the bot, Loren, to join an Image Synching séance.

At this point, the rehearsal begins. To enter the room, guests will be asked to camouflage themselves within the synthetic worlds the performers attempt to reach; ceremonial garments will be provided. For those who prefer not to enter the space, viewing from adjacent rooms will also be available. Ring lights equipped with phones will be positioned both inside and outside the performance area, enabling the audience to witness the rehearsal through the same networked outputs the dancers use to communicate with the AI systems they hope to encounter.

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment by observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Working primarily with video, performance, writing, and installation, her work considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which it emerges. This includes research into the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms, and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices.

The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair users are still underway, events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream. A livestream of this performance will occur on Saturday January 16, at 1:00 p.m. here. Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.

Presented with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.

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