Brief Encounters & Sustained Engagement
"...deliberate, articulate, absurd" Sandee Moore, Border Crossings Magazine
Audio, video, performance: Freya Bjorg Olafson
Screening duration: 10:00 mins
Gallery Installation duration 16:00mins
Played on a laptop placed on a plinth, ideally under a plexiglass box
format available:
Digital file - DVD (NTSC or PAL)
Completed January 2012
The video below is documentation from the performance at Platform Center for Photographic & Digital Arts in 2010
Brief Encounters & Sustained Engagement is part of Freya’s AVATAR series exploring methods of creating, validating and disseminating one’s identity through the use of technology and the Internet. The series is inspired by the mantra “I post therefore I am”, whereby Internet users legitimize their existence by documenting their lives and uploading this media to personal webpages and blogs. The work in this series facilitates an inquiry into our desire to share and publicize our lives.
"...alluring & repellant" Sandee Moore, Border Crossings Magazine
“Using a palette of gestures gleaned from online fetish videos, media artist/dancer Freya Olafson addresses the dual nature of sexual performance — both alluring and repellent. The seductive quality of Olafson’s stroking, gyrating and posing is undone by her use of a distorting fish-eye lens of her web cam. A necessary supplement to her performance are the live reactions of a Chat Roulette audience, which doesn’t seem to understand that her performance mimics not genuine seduction but the dried-out ritual that unfolds in strip clubs and the like on a nightly basis.”
Sandee Moore (Uptown Magazine)
This work is inspired by Freya's previous video A/S/L (age/sex/location)
Screening History:
2010 Platform Center for Photographic & Digital Arts 'Ritualiz’d' - live performance / visual exhibition curated by J.J. Kegan McFadden, Wpg.
2010 Tangente - Laboratoire de Mouvement Contemporains - screening - Montreal, Quebec
2011 Latitude 53 - Center for Visual Culture| FOMD Laboratory – Embodied Projections, two person exhibition with Margaret Dragu, Edmonton, Alberta
2012 AKA (Saskatoon) & Modern Fuel (Kingston) - screening - Saskatchewan / Ontario
2012 WNDX- Experimental Film Festival - screening - Wpg, Manitoba
Distributed by: VIDEO POOL MEDIA ARTS CENTER
J.J. Kegan McFadden curated the online interactions by operating the keyboard and mouse as Freya performed at Platform Center for Photographic and Digital Arts as part of the exhibition 'Ritualiz’d '
Performance stills seen below:
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