ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA

Athens Biennale AB7: ECLIPSE

ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA was commissioned and produced by the Athens Biennale for AB7: ECLIPSE, which presented narratives from contemporary Black, queer, speculative, and radical artistic voices in conversation with practices of rituals, worldmaking, and interdependence. The biennale championed a revisiting of identities and a queering of history through radical care, virtual, and fluid alternative states.

Performed live on September 23-24, 2021 at the Former Department Store Fokas in Athens, Greece, the work embodied the biennale's mission to summon transformative powers and usher audiences beyond the current era into a space of thought and reflection.

The former Department Store Fokas served as the main venue for AB7: ECLIPSE, where ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA opened the entire exhibition. This historic commercial space in Athens provided the perfect backdrop for exploring themes of transformation and virtual embodiment within the context of the city's contemporary art landscape.

Part 1: Virtual Performance

The performance is staged in a virtual amphitheater where the artist is embodied as an avatar adorned in stylized armor. Using live motion capture technology, the artist appears in the virtual space and begins to rhyme, creating a real-time 3D environment that audiences can explore together or alone.

"Unveiled biennale, holy grail eclipse
golly exalted derailed leaderships
post folly prevailing sailing space ships
hailing from Cali inhale post-Pokalypse (...)"

Part 2: Physical Installation

In the physical exhibition space, the armor that adorns the avatar is installed on a pedestal, displayed as a relic. The 3D-printed sculptural armor stands alongside a monitor that loops the virtual performance, creating a dialogue between digital and physical presence.

Design & Development Process

The creation of ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA involved extensive 3D modeling, digital sculpting, and iterative design processes. From initial concept sketches to final 3D-printed armor pieces, the work demonstrates a seamless integration of digital and physical fabrication techniques.

Extended Performance: Gray Area Festival

Following the Athens Biennale premiere, ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA was presented virtually at Gray Area Festival on October 26, 2021 at 6:00PM PST. This virtual performance allowed global audiences to experience the work remotely, with viewers invited to explore the online environment and witness the artist appearing "as an avatar adorned in stylized armor" performing the same rhyming sequence.

The Gray Area presentation demonstrated the work's capacity for distributed exhibition and virtual presence, extending the reach of the performance beyond the physical constraints of the Athens exhibition space while maintaining the core experience of avatar embodiment and virtual amphitheater interaction.

Machine Violence: New York Exhibition (2023)

In 2023, ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA made its New York debut as part of "Machine Violence," a groundbreaking group exhibition at Postmasters Gallery in Manhattan. Curated with immense gratitude to Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich, this exhibition brought the work back to the United States in a powerful new context exploring technology's relationship with violence and control.

The exhibition occupied a spectacular ground floor space on Bond Street in downtown Manhattan—a former carpentry shop with skylights, brick walls, and 20-foot-tall ceilings left intentionally raw. As the gallery described, this setting freed "artists' projections, screens, sculptures, prints and paintings from the homogeneity of a white box," creating an environment where "art can survive anywhere."

For Machine Violence, ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA was presented through both its physical 3D-printed armor sculpture and two interactive Instagram AR filters: "Eclipsatrix Exuvia" and "Damocles." These filters recast users as "armored, warrior-like characters," allowing gallery visitors to embody the digital persona through their mobile devices. This presentation emphasized the work's exploration of virtual embodiment and digital identity transformation.

The exhibition positioned ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA alongside works by digital art pioneers including Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Miltos Manetas, as well as contemporary artists like Damjanski and Gracelee Lawrence. Critics noted how the show addressed "the current moment of intense uncertainty along the art-technology axis," creating dialogue between historic digital art works and new generation explorations of machine violence and technological control.

"Machine violence invariably fosters fear and disruption on an individual or societal scale. As artworks in this exhibition attest, it is left to humans - artists, in this case - to redirect, subvert, and/or transcend the literal narrative."
— Machine Violence Exhibition Statement

The New York presentation demonstrated how ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA's themes of digital embodiment and virtual resistance resonated within broader conversations about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technological control. By presenting the work through both physical sculpture and interactive AR experiences, the exhibition highlighted the dual nature of the piece—existing simultaneously in physical and digital realms while questioning the boundaries between human and machine identity.

Critical Context

Living mostly in the metaverse, Huntrezz Janos has "evaporated into the thin air of digital quasi-existence, neither exactly human nor avatar." The work explores cyber-escapism and digital resistance that characterizes a new generation of futuristic guerrilla insurgents, with bold abandonment of physicality and embracement of multiplied selves.

ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA embodies a new breed of art persona that is boldly superficial yet deeply political, challenging the limitations of the physical world while addressing contemporary issues of LGBTQ+ rights, trans-corporeal identity, and virtual embodiment as forms of resistance and self-determination.

Press Coverage

ECLIPSATRIX EXUVIA and its presentation at Athens Biennale AB7: ECLIPSE received critical attention from major art publications, highlighting the work's significant contribution to contemporary discussions around the metaverse, digital identity, and virtual performance.

The coverage emphasized the work's significance within the biennale's exploration of metaverse politics and digital embodiment, highlighting how participating artists—many working under pseudonyms and exploring digital practices—were "laying claim, creating, meeting, building, and thriving in digital realms" as part of an effort to "queer the Metaverse."