A duet between a live moving body and an animated self-portrait, Dream No. 2 explores the duality of life in the digital age and the true nature of our private and public personas. The work celebrates the joy and catharsis of dance, and combines it with rotoscope-animation, the process of tracing videos frame-by-frame to create naturalistic animated movement.

Bringing to life multiple shadow selves in this manner—translating dance videos into thousands of self-portraits—is a sedentary, time-consuming and meditative practice, one that complements and collides with the wild abandon and instantaneity captured in the dance documents from which those animations originated.

In Dream No. 2, the artist is joined by his animated avatars “live” in virtual space. Together, “flesh and blood” and its “digital double” investigate whether the “selfies” we project onto the world are mere ephemera or dangerous doppelgangers with the potential to usurp our true identities.

markbath.com