Claudia Hart’s second work on Sedition, The Prison of the Body reflects on the work of early 1970s performance and video artists such as Valie Export, Peter Weibel and Joan Jonas. Unlike the artists from the '70s however, Hart does not use video as a means to capture and document the physical, but rather draws on the possibilities of virtual simulation to metamorphose the real into something else - something unreal, uncanny, and indefinable.
The Prison of the Body is a virtual performance that allies digital techniques with more traditional creative processes - a combination of analogue video and digital mapping are used to create the oscillating camera view and the simulation of a woman's belly, breathing rhythmically. Hart has married this imagery to the unsettling and incessant sound of high heels pacing the floor, overlaid with a heartbeat matching the movement of the camera.
This blend of reality and simulation is endlessly cycled on a 'loop', now a cliché of digital cinema, from the hiccupping gif to the kind of circular temporality presented in many animation installations - and a metaphor for the imprisonment of Hart's notional digital mind and body.
