Soup: PTII Residency
Soup: PTII was an interdisciplinary artist residency based at Stryx, Birmingham. The residency awarded emerging artists in the West Midlands the opportunity to work for 8 weeks in the heart of Digbeth, giving artists uninterrupted time and space to develop their projects.
With much of his practice featuring a high level of individual control. For the culmination of the Soup PtII residency, the artist virtually ceded control of his own body to a large crowd. using a combination of photo manipulation, Character Animation and webcam face scanner software, visitors were invited to manipulate the "digital David" using their facial movements and gestures. Their puppetry of the avatar playfully parallels the artist's own excessive control in the edit suite in a way that is accessible, inclusive and fun, albeit with disturbing and troubling undertones. In the exhibition and documentation, participants' movements are anonymised through the puppet, allowing them free reign to lose control of their own bodies as they see fit. The instability of the technology, with repeated freezing in bizarre or comical poses, unintentionally adds to the overall sense of the uncontrollable.