Proximity Cinema, Black Forest, 2013. | Photo: Xarene Eskandar, Tiffany Trenda.
What's most surprising about the soft, red vinyl suit stretched tight across the lithe body of Los Angeles-based media artist Tiffany Trenda is just how warm it is. Touching her arm, cautiously at first -- there are more than 100 other people either watching your every move from a safe distance in the gallery or wishing they could be doing exactly what you're doing and anxiously awaiting their turns -- you want to slide your hand in a curious caress up to her very warm shoulder.
But now she's reaching for you, drawing you to her, and you see up close at one of the suit's 43 embedded cell phone screens. They flash a series of prosaic phrases: It's OK. Go ahead. Don't worry about it.
So you go ahead. You touch one of the screens and it turns into a camera, and now you're seeing the flesh beneath the suit and recognizing instantly where you've touched this warm, red body. At a certain point you're wishing you could take a selfie -- this would look awesome on Instagram -- and the moment is over. She has turned around in some seriously high platforms and is stretching to embrace someone else.
This intimate and yet entirely public experience, which seems to unfold in silent slow motion, is part of a performance piece called Proximity Cinema, and is one of a series of media artworks staged at venues around the world by Trenda. They are designed specifically to question our increasingly complex relationship to media and technology. Who are we in relation to our screens? What are memory, identity, intimacy and the body now, as each is filtered through the internet and media? Should we be worried about the mediation of, well, everything?
Trenda began her career studying dance, painting, photography and installation as she earned a BFA in fine art from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. At a certain point, she realized that she wanted to integrate all of these art forms, which she did with her first performance at Art Center before she graduated. She then turned her focus to media art by earning her MFA through UCLA's Design Media Arts program and she now creates her internationally acclaimed media art projects from a studio based in Marina del Rey. Trenda is currently one of a handful of artists investigating the relationship between the body and technology specifically through wearable media.
Body Code, Times Square, 2013. | Photo: Tiffany Trenda.
Proximity Cinema was based on Valie Export's Tapp und Tastkino (TOUCH and TAP Cinema) from 1968, Trenda explains, recalling Export's notorious street performance in which the Austrian artist unabashedly invited passersby to reach inside a box covering her torso to feel her breasts. The project grappled -- quite literally -- with the relationship between cinema's visual pleasure viewed onscreen at a distance, and the reality of women's lived bodies, up close and fleshy.
For Trenda, the focus now must shift from the cinema screen of the last century to the mobile screen as our diminutive devices serve as the site for so many interactions, both public and private, formal and informal. We're constantly on our cell phones and we're having private talks and sharing private messages in public -- you can sit next to someone at the gym who is having a conversation with their therapist. So we experience these domains crossing over more and more.
According to Trenda, the snippets of text visible on the screens in Proximity Cinema represent the three most frequent things said between men and women in a relationship. The piece also takes several of our most common activities -- looking, touching -- and transforms them.
I'm exploring how different acts are changing, she explains. So, for example, 25 years ago, scan' referred to a human-to-human interaction. Now it's a human-to-machine interaction. It's similar with touch; we don't think of touch as a physical touch anymore; instead, it's something we do with our iPads. During the performance, when I interact with people, I try to be very sensual; I hug them, I caress them, and I touch them physically. But they're only able to touch me through the screens, and that's similar to what we're doing today. We're trying to have these interactions, but they're mediated by screens. We feel more comfortable touching a screen than a body.
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In imagining and then creating the wired suit for Proximity Cinema, Trenda wanted to be sure the body-hugging second skin would be tactile with a lot of texture. I tried to make it physically very sensual and sensory, she says, noting that she worked with designer Bao Tranchi, perhaps best known for designing the notorious sheer black dress for Jennifer Lopez to wear on her 46th birthday last summer.
Construction-wise, it's a very complex piece, continues Trenda. We had to solder together and then hide dozens of wires while still keeping it very sleek. I had been invited to be part of the performance program at the Metamorphoses of the Virtual -- 100 Years of Art and Freedom' show during the 55th Venice Biennale, so we had only three months to build the whole suit. It was a very intense design process.
A year before Proximity Cinema, a piece called Body Code had inaugurated Trenda's full-body suit construction, which has since become her signature design element. Body Code's mask was 3-D printed; the white suit is made of latex and emblazoned with QR codes, once again inviting people to integrate the acts of looking, scanning and searching across the surface of the female body within a 21st century mediated context. Each code links to an online listing of Google searches related to a particular body part and a particular theme. For one performa
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Proximity Cinema, Black Forest, 2013. | Photo: Xarene Eskandar, Tiffany Trenda. 
