At'onement Incorporeal

The work emerged from early experiences of online education. During this period I felt myself slipping into what I described as a digitised straitjacket — a grayscale world where nuance and texture were compressed into linear streams of information.At the same time I was working in film production, designing costumes and sets and observing the subtle art of performance. Actors communicate meaning through minute bodily cues — shifts in posture, breath, tone and gesture — reminding me how easily embodied forms of communication can disappear within systems dominated by abstraction and efficiency.

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At’Onement INC’Corporeal explores the embodied and cognitive story of institutional culture and the organisation of information as a hybrid evolution of hierarchy and subordination. The images draw on symbolic resonances that are tribal, colonial and contemporary, reflecting emotional states shaped by the externalisation of sensory capacities and an increasing reliance on analytical cognition.

The work forms part of an interactive installation reflecting on the impacts of digitised institutional systems and the physical and mental states they produce. Using the familiar visual language of PowerPoint, the installation questions how knowledge is organised and how technological systems shape patterns of attention.

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The photographic images are presented in two sequences guiding contrasting modes of perception. The first draws attention to habits of calculative thinking associated with standardisation and hierarchy. The second invites a more empathetic and reflective mode of meaning-making.

The installation reimagines elements of institutional life as a performative environment — part kindergarten, part examination room. The motif of the organisational chart structures the work. Instead of text and numbers, each position in the hierarchy is represented by an image compressing historical associations linked to the emergence of these roles. As authority diminishes, the images reduce in scale, culminating in small replicated prints representing workers at the base of the system.

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Participants sit on children’s classroom chairs equipped with clipboards, pencils and multiple-choice forms. A projection begins and a calm female voice instructs viewers to count figures appearing in the slideshow — echoing rhythms of testing and compliance. The images are then replayed as a narrative sequence, inviting viewers to observe differently and reconsider what they have seen. Participants are invited to record responses and pin them to a community board. The work brings these tensions into view, asking how institutional systems shape the ways we think, perceive and relate to one another, and how different forms of attention — analytical and empathetic, abstract and embodied — influence the ways knowledge is created and shared.