What does it mean to be human? How does my body relate to machines? These are questions that photographer, video artist and performance artist Isabelle Wenzel (1982, DE) tries to answer in her new video work Automatia. In 6 different scenes we see her moving and dancing in desolate landscapes. She’s not alone: her partner is a drone. He follows her movements, swinging back and forth, whizzing up and down. Two bodies dancing a duet.
The locations for the scenes have been deliberately chosen: a barren dry plain, a field in winter where the stumps of the harvested crop stick out yellow and barren from the black soil, a studio with a green screen, an abandoned hardware store parking lot. They are desolate and ‘dehumanized’, the dancer is alone with the drone. With this, Isabelle wants to visualize another question in her research, namely whether it is possible to restore the connection with nature that we have lost through technology, and whether technology can even save nature.