2025,
4k Single-channel digital video with sound, 10 minutes 40 seconds
Please note - an excerpt can be watched from the final frame (scroll to the bottom)
Hand in Glove (2025) employs the tragicomic grammar of mime as a critical framework for complicating the mimetic function of digital technologies. From Pierrot’s hapless, romantic melancholy to the industrial modernity of Chaplin, the mime has historically served as an avatar of alienation. The film follows a CGI figure whose movements are borrowed from mime’s extended family tree, from the Commedia dell’arte tradition of 16th-century Italy, to digital incarnations of mime found in motion capture acting, social media performances, and the repetitive loops of non-player characters (NPCs). Through disaggregated movement and the breaking-up of gestural flow, the mime can describe the technological conditions in which its own image is created. Bracketing the flow of image, the mime embodies a structural analysis of the technological conditions of image production and circulation.
In Hand in Glove, sees the mime is positioned as a profoundly ambivalent figure—simultaneously servile and anarchic, charismatic and anonymous— one is never sure whether the mime’s play is enjoyed or enforced, offering a mirror to the labour conditions that underpin digital economies. The mime acts out of need via the laborious synthesis of gamified morsels of work doled out by platform logics, whilst silently acting out —via absurd and inflated performance—against them. The work enacts a tension between two possibilities: wherein mime is positioned as a form of tacit, situated, and embodied knowledge and the much less hopeful progression of mime logic wherein that self-same embodiment performs the flattened codes of algorithmic determination as a survival skill.
Speechless and historically illiterate, the wordless becoming-image of contemporary mime can paradoxically expose the rhetorical grift of affect-driven politics and the hollow shells of language left in the wake of generative AI. The mime signals that the world we know, and our ability to describe it with words may be slipping from grasp.
Hand in Glove was first shown at MADA Gallery, Monash University, as part of my PhD Project ‘Active Images: Re-Staging Liveliness in Painting and Moving Image.
