Presented as part of “AUNTSforcamera” and R&D Season: CHOREOGRAPHY.

An important interactive component of the installation of “AUNTSforcamera” at the New Museum includes a series of nine artist-devised tours, which have been organized using AUNTS’ chain-curation model. Nine artists have been invited by “AUNTSforcamera” artists to create a response to the exhibition in the form of a tour, which will be performed exclusively for and with participating audiences. Jessica Cook was invited by Collective Settlement (Felicia Ballos, Jean Brennan, and T Charnan Lewis).

Created by the three choreographers of Collective Settlement, drawing a line with my body straight to you is a three-channel sculptural work that uses the format of an “exquisite corpse” to generate unique video-dances for three different parts of the body (head, torso, and legs). The videos, displayed on a stack of three CRT monitors, offer a moving-image representation of the dancers’ bodies reconstituted as one figure. Responding to this work, Cook has devised a tour for “AUNTSforcamera” in which participants will observe the movements of isolated body parts in the various works on view and then record new dances inspired by their observations against backdrops created by Cook. The montage that results will appear to transform the contributions of tour participants into a single dancing body.

In keeping with the spirit of AUNTS, the currency of exchange for attending these tours is not monetary; instead visitors must provide proof of submission to #auntsforcamera, an interactive work by Karl Scholz included in the “AUNTSforcamera” exhibition. #auntsforcamera utilizes the downloadable app OchoVideo to record eight-second user-generated video clips to become part of a sequenced single-channel video installation (on view in the New Museum lobby) that accumulates over the course of the entire project from September 8, 2014, to February 15, 2015.