In our world of perpetual connectivity, touching interfaces that keep us out of reach, we form attachments whilst remaining detached, by turns kindling and dampening emotions. Conceived as the first in a series of musings on the paradoxical and sometimes poignant nature of human relationships amid networked life, Out of Touch was created in Flash and incorporates text sequences, randomness, intensively filtered video, sound and cut-up voices.
This Out of Touch episode was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the Third Hand Plays series curated by Brian Stefans, who wrote:
Her use of video, particularly the manipulations that reduce reality to iconic or cartoon-like (which I read as linguistic) simplicity, accentuates some of the horror at the base of this piece, which has a quasi-Expressionist element — I can’t help but see echoes of “The Scream” in here, or perhaps, with a very different valence in relation to time and experience (it doesn’t happen in Wilks’s piece), the blurred faces in the work of Christian Boltanski.
Out of Touch extended for live performance
After creating the original Out of Touch piece for SFMOMA, Christine began to develop the ideas further as an ongoing project of playable and performing media. The focus of the extended project has been for live digital performance. Version 1.0 of her OOT performance interface includes two additional interactive pieces, Out of Hand and Out of Sight, which she performs live as playable media.
