zoomself
zoomself was created through a collaborative Zoom workshop with graduate and undergraduate students in San Jose State Universityโs Topics in Installation Art: The Shape of Space. Using the structure of the Zoom grid as both material and environment, participants moved their bodies in and out of individual screens while shared virtual backgrounds connected the separate windows into a larger visual space. Eyes, mouths, hands, arms, and other parts of the body were isolated and repeated across the grid until the group began to function as a fragmented collective body.
Created during a period when social interaction had been compressed onto personal screens, the project plays with the strange physicality of meeting through video. The body is simultaneously present and absent, contained within a rectangle but able to disrupt its edges through movement, scale, and proximity to the camera. zoomself uses the limitations of the digital interface to create a new kind of shared space where individual bodies remain physically separate while becoming part of something larger together. 2021
