Marina Abramović’s 'The Life' - The World’s First Mixed Reality Performance Artwork | Christie's

The ‘godmother of performance art’ talks to us about her groundbreaking new work, ahead of its landmark sale in 2020.
Over the course of six days in February 2019 the performance artist Marina Abramović (b. 1946) invited members of the public to London’s Serpentine Gallery to witness something that had never been done before. The Life - a 19-minute performance realised through volumetric capture and presented in Mixed Reality - was the first large-scale public exhibition of anything in this new medium. Tickets sold out in just over two hours.
It had been five years since Abramović staged her critically acclaimed 512 Hours at the same gallery. For that performance, the subject of the work became the energy collectively created by the visitors and the artist, who was in the gallery every day.
It was a natural extension of The Artist is Present at MoMA, which in 2010 set the record for attendance at the museum with 850,000 visitors over three months - a record that remains unsurpassed. For The Life the concept was altogether different: can presence be conveyed even when the artist is elsewhere? The implications were both universal and eternal.
After unburdening themselves from all connected devices (phones, watches, etc), participants in The Life don a pair of MR goggles and are escorted to viewing positions by attendants in lab coats. In front of the backdrop of the gallery’s actual walls, and the other visitors, a film-real Abramović - hair pulled back tightly and wearing a crimson dress - performs within a roped-off five-metre circle.
The event is choreographed to the specific capabilities of the technology - and feels absolutely real. This is the entirety of the artist, presented as if in the room with the audience. Talking to Christie’s in the short film above, Abramović explains that the work is about immortality: ‘Because you are there, preserved for ever.’
‘A hundred years beyond when anybody who ever knew [Marina] was alive, there will be people who will see her walk into the room and will feel that sense of connection, of human experience,’ adds Todd Eckert, the founder of Tin Drum, the Mixed Reality production team behind The Life.
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