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.
--
--
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
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Proximity Cinema, Black Forest, 2013. | Photo: Xarene Eskandar, Tiffany Trenda. 
