Oct - Dec, 2024
Pennsylvania College of Art & Design (PCA&D)
Exhibition Overview
In the fall of 2024, the Reminiscence – The Monologues of Being Seen was presented as a three-month featured exhibition at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design (PCA&D). Installed across three floors of the main gallery, this fourth major iteration of the Posture Portrait Project marked the culmination of years of interdisciplinary work blending interactive media, performance, sculptural data, and community testimony. The installation wove together historical critique, digital embodiment, and participatory reflection to construct a layered inquiry into visibility, memory, and representation. This exhibition built on the foundations established in prior installations at Connecticut College, Virginia Tech, and SIGGRAPH, while also introducing new components that responded to the unique architecture and community of PCA&D. The spatial layout of the gallery facilitated a segmented but interconnected experience: from traditional 2D posture photographs on the first floor, to live performance and immersive projection on the second, to 3D interactive sculptures and oral histories on the third.
Components and Spatial Design
The first floor functioned as a photographic archive. A large montage of 126 posture portraits—including new contributions from PCA&D participants—was arranged across three walls, visible even to pedestrians outside the building. The photographs were not merely documentary in nature; they reflected agency and choice, inviting viewers to consider the relationship between representation and autonomy (Fleetwood, 2020). The second floor hosted an opening night performance by Heidi Henderson and Pamela Vail. The two dancers performed an improvised postural duet, surrounded by projection-mapped silhouettes of participants in motion. These were not static figures but ephemeral gestures, "the prelude to being seen," rendered from video sequences taken during data collection. Henderson's costume for Vail incorporated stitched archival imagery, transforming the garment into a tactile archive—a material embodiment of memory and critique (Willis, 2021). On the third floor, participants encountered 3D-printed sculptures representing abstracted bodily forms. These were paired with monologues recorded by PCA&D participants, accessible through interactive RFID-triggered platforms. The viewer could place a sculpture on the pedestal and listen as a voice narrated a deeply personal story of what it means to be seen—or unseen. The projected mesh visualizations accompanying these interactions subtly faded and reappeared, underscoring the affective texture of remembrance and erasure.
Community Engagement and Participatory Method
Leading up to the installation, the artists visited PCA&D in early 2024 to collect new data and engage the community in reflective dialogue about posture, identity, and recognition. Participants were invited not only to be photographed but to respond to a prompt: "When did you feel truly seen?" These reflections were later shaped into short monologues, offering varied insights on embodiment, vulnerability, and resistance. Some narratives spoke to the joy of unguarded acceptance, while others revealed ambivalence about visibility itself. Still others addressed identity as both a site of connection and concealment. These voices became integral to the final work, transforming it into an affective archive and collective theorization of the politics of recognition. This engagement reflects the methodology of arts-based research that privileges lived experience and expressive form (Leavy, 2015). Performance, installation, and narrative here were not illustrative devices but modes of inquiry—mechanisms for producing knowledge through embodied presence, storytelling, and community reflection (Taylor, 2003; Campt, 2017).
Theoretical Framework and Technological Innovations
The PCA&D installation extended the project's long-standing critique of institutional visual regimes. Relying on frameworks from critical race and feminist theory (Browne, 2015; Benjamin, 2019), the project foregrounded how legibility, surveillance, and aesthetic calibration—particularly in photography and digital imaging—have historically marginalized Black and Brown bodies. A notable technical challenge emerged in this iteration as well: black clothing failed to reflect infrared signals in Kinect-based 3D scanning, leading to partial or missing body data. This incident became a moment of critical reflection, underscoring how even contemporary imaging systems reproduce racialized invisibility (Browne, 2015). To overcome this, the team employed machine learning techniques to reconstruct missing body geometry from monocular video (Guo et al., 2023), then re-abstracted these shapes into the sculptural forms used in the installation. There are also a few other research studies that can help us resolve these challenges, such as PersonNeRF and HumanNeRF (Weng 2023, 2022).
Impact and Significance
PCA&D's iteration stands out for its reparative intimacy. Compared to the expansive technological environments of Virginia Tech or SIGGRAPH, this installation fostered closeness and co-presence. Feedback from participants and gallery visitors revealed a sense of recognition and quiet resonance. As one audience member wrote, "My body became a mirror. I wasn't just watching—I was remembering." The institutional recognition from PCA&D also marked a milestone in the project's trajectory. This exhibit became the latest node in a multi-year research journey and laid the foundation for future explorations into durational performance, textile archives, and cross-community dialogue. The installation did not seek to resolve the tensions of visibility and surveillance—but rather to dwell with them, to listen, to witness, and to remember otherwise.
References
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity.
Benjamin, R. (2024). Viral justice: How we grow the world we want. Princeton University Press.
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.
Campt, T. (2017). Listening to images. Duke University Press.
Fleetwood, N. R. (2020). Marking time: Art in the age of mass incarceration. Harvard University Press.
Guo, C., Jiang, T., Chen, X., Song, J., & Hilliges, O. (2023, June). Vid2Avatar: 3D avatar reconstruction from videos in the wild via self-supervised scene decomposition. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (pp. 12858–12868). IEEE.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.
Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press.
Weng, C.-Y., Srinivasan, P. P., Curless, B., & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I. (2023). PersonNeRF: Personalized reconstruction from photo collections. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 6105–6115.
Weng, C.-Y., Curless, B., Srinivasan, P. P., Barron, J. T., & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I. (2022). HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint rendering of moving people from monocular video. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 16210–16220.
Willis, D. (2021). The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. NYU Press.
