VIDEO PROGRAM

On The Screen // In Real Life

Video Program:On The Screen // In Real Life is a 30-minute multimedia solo piece that combines the live performance of synth-pop songs with a set of multichannel TVs, pre-recorded videos, and live-recording cameras. As an unnamed character hiding behind large sunglasses and a wig, Bozeman sings lyrics into multiple cameras that tell the story of an individual in the midst of a dissociative breakdown. As his image proliferates across TV screens, lines blur between the artist’s body and the reflection and projection of that body, creating a tug of war between self and self-image. To achieve authentic self-representation, the artist gets caught in a comical losing battle to “get right” what’s on the screen as he physically manipulates cables, camera angles, and visual loops. In a quest for wholeness within a technologically mediated world, the artist can only make eye contact with the audience through the cameras. As the artist-as-psyche’s desperation deepens, he questions whether he is “a human or a transmission.” Expanding technology-bound selfhood explored by pioneer artists and thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Laurie Anderson, Video Program toggles between sincerity and absurdity, eliciting laughter as a form of identifying with the artist in his journey for self-acceptance. Video Program explores the unavoidability of technology’s role in human self-knowledge and nods to cultural obsessions with TikTok and other forms of social media that turn personal lives into A/V production studios, always ready to stream themselves as new content into the world.