Body-Me: Kate Cooper

RIGGED, 2014
HD Videos 1:54 min and 4:28 min
two digital prints on wallpaper (fleece wallpaper)
Courtesy the artist and Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin

In her installation RIGGED, Kate Cooper uses CGI technology to translate the physical body into hyper real, stereotypical, female models. Her entirely constructed computer generated models of young women with flawless bodies in sports wear borrow from the familiar aesthetics of mass-advertising. In a light jog, they move through a sterile, digitally animated surrounding that lacks spatial depth or other natural features. Close-ups of the computer generated faces display silver braces and plastic mouth guards, or track the models’ glances with mimetic precision. The billboard-size fleece wallpaper picks up on these motifs, rendering the figures synthetically superhuman. The images have an auditory element in which a flattering feminine voice meditates on the ideal of an ageless and youthful body, ultimately repeating the slogan “disappear completely” over and over again. With their exaggerated perfection and symbolic optimization, the female figures in RIGGED no longer represent a real life corporeality. By appropriating the pervasive visual language of commercialism, the artist reflects its agency with particular reference to the female body and advances a new interpretation of feminist discourse.

Kate Cooper has been a member of the collaborative art studio Auto Italia South East since 2007. Her work, both as part of a collective and as a solo artist, revolves around alternative forms of artistic production. She questions the essence and meaning of digital-age images with regard to a contemporary hypercapitalism that increasingly utilizes immaterial labor and outsources production to other parts of the world.