KIM AND NICK were quick to dis- cover their overlapping motifs. One of their first major collaborations was through Kim’s residency at SAFEhouse for the Arts in 2016. “I think we always knew we had similar aesthetic tastes in art. I was like, ‘oh this person can visualize what I’m saying. So working together feels very comfortable.” As her bio reads, Kim Ip (aka Krimm) uses her choreography to undermine the stereotypes and expecta- tions of the performing womxns’ body as it relates to American Pop Culture.” Kim’s work “critiques the mediated gaze of womxns’ bodies in the media by creating alternate experiences on stage.” One night in 2016, Kim and Nick revealed new identity experiments in nightlife. Kim’s face and chest is covered in blood; Nick, layered in clownish white paint and dripping black makeup as one of the early horror-inspired Pseuda numbers. What ensued that night was a fabulously grue- some photo shoot atop a bed that memo- rialized their altered identities.
“IT WAS ABOUT THE VIDEO VIXEN, ” Kim explains. “We placed a mover inside the box to show the entrapment of an identity that people project onto. The video vixen is widely seen in the media, dancing in Hip Hop music videos or video games. The public idea has a projected idea about who that person is, how they live their life, what decisions they make. So they’re trapped. But my goal in making the piece is showing that there’s so much complexity to that body, their pleasures, and their athleticism that can move in dynamic ways.” Kim’s work at B4bel4b foreshadowed future collaborations with Nick/Pseuda that examined the video vixens in our selfie camera. Now, in March 2021 — a year into the pandemic — digital media’s voyeuristic capacity has expanded in deeper facets of everyday life. The new norm for many of us is to be devoid of live social interaction, and so we find deeper comfort in social media for the affirmation of our identities and our work. “There’s a value judgment that happens in my head,” Nick reflects, “Then I begin to analyze my work based on likes...it’s just strange. The struggle is to be liked and feel seen.”
“You have to also consider the tools that are being provided by the platform too,” Kim adds. “The tools on Instagram nurture an environment where we seek a semi celebrity status.” As the pandemic progresses, so does use of social media. While some artists affirm the vitality of rest and stress the need to not strain our days for constant production; others constantly produce, share, and engage. Collaborations rehearse in virtual space, adapt, livestream their art with refreshed technological tools. And this output, as always, is saturated in the mass man- ufacturing of curated identities, (un)willingly mediated, manipu- lated, and stretched beyond that original post. “We’re all watching our curated lives that we’re sharing with each other. We’re predicting the way we’re all watching each oth- er, and unconsciously this alters how we engage with the world.” Nick observes. His vision of an augmenting techno-voyeurism evokes Neo in The Matrix, who wakes up in a pod of installed screens neighboring additional pods that span ad infinitum. “It’s what I call the microcosm. It’s a dystopian machinescape where we’re all individually isolated.” Identities in these pods are curat- ed, distorted, and feedback endlessly to ourselves.
“AS NICK, I was getting too in my head about how I was expressing myself online and whether it was too premeditated or actually represented my real identity. At a certain point, Nick left and Pseuda stayed.” With Nick’s emergent identities materializing across screens and stages throughout the country, he retired his personal Instagram account and curated a newfound persona. One where his relationship to digital media was a shadow of a hidden identity. Simultaneously in San Francisco, Kim Ip was emerging as a practicing dance artist in the city’s interdisciplinary performance scene. Having recently received her BA in Dance from Mills College, she found her artistic home in SF through residen- cies at Shawl-Anderson, SAFEHouse for the Arts, and CounterPulse. Her work inves- tigates the mediated image and the concept of the video vixen, who is at once cele- brated and held at a moral high ground in public scrutiny. (Namely, Britney Spears. In the recently streamed work, “ It’s Like Groundhog Day Everyday ,” Kim responds to the #FREEBRITNEY movement with a Lynchian love letter to the celebrity.)
Kim Ip
A YEAR LATER, Kim & Nick collaborated on
Steep in Here , as part of B4bel4b’s VITAL HYBRIDS
performance showcase at Gray Area. In this work a large white cube enclosed dancers who moved within the confines of their contoured identities, while silhouettes of other bodies were projected onto the white box. Shadows were emulating reality and attempt- ing to learn from the dancers, as bewildered voyeurs in the audience tried to distinguish mediated outlines from their organic origin.
THIS ECHO CHAMBER became the basis for Nick and Kim’s work, are:era , as part of Coun- terPulse’s 2021 Combustible Residency culminating on-site and virtually this April. The work coalesces towering video monitors into a circular perimeter surrounding the dancers. Devised by co-collaborator and creative technologist Taurin Barrera, the panopticon surveils and absorbs the choreographed identity, as large monitors track and regurgitate live move- ments. =In this space, “organic movement is but an echo of the past, remembered through the flicker of screens,” as the work description reads.
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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