Half Body Is on the Ground and the Other Half Is Underground is an interactive installation and live audiovisual performance system built from the digital reconstruction of a burned forest. The work asks: how can a damaged site still be perceived when its original natural soundscape has been removed? How can the body become a surface through which absence, memory, and misrecognition are reorganised?
This project investigates how technological systems, sensory perception, and spatial memory become entangled. Initiated during a residency at outsideininsideout, it began as an interactive installation reconstructing a charred forest through 3D scanning. The environment was overlaid with white noise, erasing natural sound and reframing listening as the reading of a trace rather than an immediate presence. A flickering candle served as the only light source; its variations were captured via an Arduino sensor and transmitted to Unreal Engine, driving real-time fluctuations in virtual illumination. This physical–digital feedback loop foregrounded how unstable sensory evidence shapes spatial experience.
The project has since evolved into a live audio-visual system integrating Unreal Engine, Max/MSP, and a custom bodily interface. It has been presented at Studio.db, Kunsthaus Kule, Dock Digital, 90mil (Berlin), St James Garlickhythe, and Venue MOT (London). Each iteration operates as an experiment at the thresholds between signal and noise, and between material and virtual presence.
Drawing on the Chinese tale Painted Skin, which questions the reliability of surface versus essence, the work examines how perception constructs and erodes truth, revealing how sensory and technical systems co-produce unstable realities.
In light, I cover my body. In darkness, I illuminate my own deformities. I drift between the visible and the invisible, afraid of both exposure and disappearance.
I am torn between multiple, disordered memories. These fragments, scattered across time, make me believe in past lives and prevent me from letting go of any detail. Memory is like a drawer sealed, forgotten, then reopened, forming a nonlinear, fragmented logic of being. I carry these memories forward, even as they consume me.
Because of the chaos of language and the dislocation of memory, I cannot tell a coherent story. I cannot articulate myself. I often murmur softly, not knowing how to begin, or where. My thoughts are fragmented, and so is my sense of self. Without a stable linguistic structure, I cannot form a stable self perception. I move among humans, concealing my identity. When someone’s words or actions touch the ruptures in my memory or collide with my present state, I erupt. I bite. I destroy.
My body is also incomplete. Desire drives me to constantly reshape myself, to grow the organs and capacities I was never granted. I build my body in the mud, smearing, crying, stumbling through the systems of the city. I exist through an ongoing process of rupture and reconstruction. My body remains incomplete, composed of desire, memory, history, and reality, stitched together through struggle. I am always in the process of becoming.
The reality I experience is unstable and constantly mutates between narration and being narrated, meaning and misinterpretation. My rage, my body, and my language are all generated within this unstable structure.
*MAX MSP
*Unreal Engine
*Arduino
*Zbrush
*Blender
*Adobe Substance 3D Painter
