Stretching to meet your Desire
A life-sized silicone figure of the artist hangs in the center of the gallery, suspended by a grid of computer-controlled cables. Around the room, a series of small control stations lets visitors manipulate different parts of the body and face, setting keyframes and building shared animations. Some consoles tune facial expressions, others pose limbs, and others control overall tension, timing, or playback. Music tracks can be selected that directly drive aspects of the animation, syncing gestures to rhythm or mood. The piece becomes a collaborative character editor and choreography tool, where visitors must work together, or against each other, to decide what this shared body is asked to do in public.
Detailed Description
The installation is built around a hyper-real silicone cast of a single adult body, modeled on the artist and mounted on an internal armature. Thin, high-strength cables attach to key points, wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, neck, jaw, and spine, and run up to a ceiling grid before returning to an array of computer-controlled winches. Every cable is addressed by software that translates visitor input into motion.
Distributed throughout the gallery are a series of compact control panels. Each panel focuses on a different layer of the body’s behavior:
Face stations let visitors choose, move, and manipulate the face. Expressions can be achieved by adjusting tension on cables tied to the eyeball or eyebrow.
Limb stations control the position and arc of arms and legs, capturing key poses at different points in time.
Spine and overall-tension stations adjust posture: slumped, attentive, reaching, bowed, strained.
Timeline stations allow visitors to set keyframes, record short sequences, and decide how motions loop, reverse, or sync to sound.
To create an animation, visitors first use their station to move their assigned body part into a pose, while another viewer then presses a "capture" button to store that position on a shared timeline. As the timeline plays back, the software blends keyframes from all stations, producing a composite choreography that can be elegant, awkward, or violently conflicted, depending on how well people cooperate. New groups can overwrite, extend, or remix previous sequences, so the body’s movement vocabulary evolves over the course of the exhibition.
Music is folded into the system as both ambience and control signal. Visitors can select from a library of tracks: calm, frantic, romantic, and metal. Beat detection and simple analysis tools translate aspects of the audio (tempo, volume, density) into parameters that modulate the animation: small gestures might pulse with the rhythm, larger arcs might swell with crescendos. Sometimes the music seems to support what the visitors intend; sometimes it pushes the body somewhere else entirely.
The figure always has the capacity to return toward a neutral stance between sequences; safety limits in the software and hardware keep cable travel and joint ranges within physical bounds. But there is no single "correct" pose or canonical performance. At any given moment, the body is the sum of many people’s partial authorship, an animated compromise between competing desires.
Conceptual Frame (Play & Tensions)
Stretching to Become Your Desire takes the familiar, playful fantasy of the avatar editor and the animation timeline, the way we casually sculpt digital bodies and choreograph them on screens, and drags it into physical space. The work asks what it means to treat a human body as a programmable surface for desire: something you keyframe, refine, and render rather than something that negotiates on its own terms.
The goal is to hold the figure in the uncanny valley, where motion feels almost natural but never fully human. The body moves with the smoothness and phrasing of animation curves, not muscles and reflexes, producing a kind of mechanical grace that is both beautiful and uncomfortable. Viewers recognize themselves in the gestures, shrugs, reaches, flinches, poses, but the way those gestures are generated makes it clear that they are being produced by a system, not a person. The magic of natural motion is recreated through fundamentally unnatural means.
Inside any human mind, there is a multitude of masters, even though we persuade ourselves there is only one. DNA pushes toward procreation, the stomach demands food, the bladder calls for relief; obligations, fears, and fantasies all compete for control. What we experience as a single, continuous self is often just a moving average of these forces. The sculpture reflects that condition: many dispersed stations, each with its own narrow agenda, collectively determine how one body moves through space.
The piece stages a tension between authorship and collaboration. No single visitor controls the whole figure; each station can only influence one region or parameter, so any finished motion is a composite. Some people will try to build coherent, respectful sequences; others will insert jarring keyframes or mismatched expressions, a serene body with a panicked face, a graceful reach that snaps into collapse on the downbeat. Because the figure is modeled on the artist, these conflicting timelines also echo the experience of being pulled between roles and expectations in real life: professional, sexual, heroic, and compliant.
By integrating music as a live input, the installation folds a broader cultural layer into the choreography. The body responds not just to individual choices but to shared soundtracks that have already trained us in how to move, desire, and perform. Play, here, becomes a way to rehearse and expose the mechanics of social pressure: dispersed, rhythmic, and often seductively packaged as entertainment.
At the same time, the work insists on our objecthood. The silicone cast is obviously a thing in the room, a piece of hardware; yet its movements and resemblance to a specific person make it impossible to regard as just an object. Visitors are asked to oscillate between seeing a body and seeing a machine, between identifying with the figure and treating it as material. In that, oscillation is a difficult recognition: we are people with interior lives, but we are also things that can be moved, posed, and used by the systems we inhabit.
Structure of Participation
Type of space: Self-directed interactive room with a central hanging figure and multiple control stations distributed around the perimeter and in adjacent alcoves.
Rules: Simple on-screen prompts at each station explain the basics: move a slider or joystick to pose, press a button to capture a keyframe, and choose how it loops. A central display shows the shared timeline and which stations currently have influence, but there are no scores or explicit objectives.
Guidance: Light staff presence to explain safety boundaries (maximum number of active stations at once, no physical contact with the figure) and to reset or mute sequences if needed. No performers are required; the drama comes from how visitors choose to compose and recombine motion.
Intervals: Works well with timed groups. Each group inherits the existing library of animations and can either watch, layer on top of, or partially overwrite previous sequences. The system can be periodically archived and lightly pruned to keep motion readable and mechanically safe.
Social Dynamics
The installation encourages negotiation, authorship battles, and unexpected alliances. Visitors at different stations quickly discover that they are co-animating the same body: a subtle arm movement may be overridden by a dramatic spine bend; a carefully tuned facial expression may be undercut by someone else’s slapstick leg gesture. Some groups will self-organize into a kind of impromptu animation team, counting off beats and coordinating keyframes; others will lean into sabotage, creating chaotic, contradictory motions just to see what happens.
Attention stays on the shared body, the control interfaces, and the central timeline display. People read each other’s intentions through both the figure’s movement and the way others handle their stations, tentatively, aggressively, playfully. The container is clear (program the body, watch it move), but the emotional and ethical questions are open-ended: What does it mean to make a stranger’s body perform your sequence? When does collaboration feel generous, and when does it feel like coercion?
Requirements & Support
Run time: Engineered for continuous operation over at least 4 months, with robust rigging, redundant safety systems, and regular inspection of cables, joints, actuators, and control electronics.
Space: Ideally 500–1500 sq ft within allocation, with clear circulation, adequate height for the cable grid, and sound treatment to manage music playback and ambient noise.
Staff & expertise: Figure fabrication (silicone and internal armature); structural engineer or experienced rigger for the suspension system; software/controls engineer for inverse-kinematics, keyframe blending, safety constraints, and music analysis; daily operation by trained gallery technicians.
Salable elements: The sculpture can be sold as a whole, and small miniature editions can be made. Continuous time-lapse of the body’s evolution or curated "episodes" of visitor-composed choreography.