A project by Boo Chapple

Close for Comfort was installed as part of Skins of Intimate Distance. Its intention was to explore the paradox of an intimacy created by distance. Certain social, physical and sexual inhibitions that exist when you are in the same spatio-temporal location as someone else become attenuated when communication occurs at a distance. There is an excess of closeness created in one modality to compensate for the lack of it in another. Hence, we are not always disembodied in networked space, but rather, excessively bodied. Close for Comfort dealt with technologically mediated relationships between bodies and the ways in which bodyness is experienced differently when it is distributed across more than one physical location. The images created in realtime as part of the installation explored the powerfully affective experience of a body abstracted and augmented, a more than bodyness.

Close for Comfort was installed in two spaces in the skin, an audience space and a performer space. Information about inhabitation of the audience space was collected by movement and pressure sensors and relayed back to the computer in the performer space where it mapped to the intensity of visual information being generated. The performer was able to manipulate this information by how they chose to display themselves to the camera and they were also able to type messages to the audience.