WHAT-IF?: IN THE DAYS WHEN THE TIGER SMOKED
is an experimental video unfolding a role-playing workshop where participants reenact a fictional polyamorous romance. The performance, played by a rotating international cast of artists, leads to a group wedding and honeymoon between characters based upon two obscure superheroes and two internationally renowned art personalities. The happy foursome are Stelarc, an artist whose cybernetic mission in life is to render the body obsolete; Orlan, an artist whose actual redefinition of her own body via plastic surgery confronts representations of woman throughout art history; the Scarlet Witch, a mutant superhero who has unlimited powers over probability, and the Vision, a “synthezoid” whose mechanically fabricated body contains a human soul. WHAT-IF?: IN THE DAYS WHEN THE TIGER SMOKED explores through a fusion of copied real life and animation the entangled stories that brought this romantic foursome together spanning the gulf between genders and representations; the body and technology.
