Glass Inward | Anna Henson

Overview

ROLE: Artist, Director, Projection Designer, Interface Designer

The Glass Inward awakens Orlando at the intersection of male and female, past and present, and the body and technology. Within this shifting environment, Orlando navigates relationships to others, time, and memory as the live body extends into cinematic, auditory, and coded doubles, foregrounding agency, surveillance, and identity in digitally entangled life. The work investigates the interplay between cinematic content, audience–actor interaction, and the splitting of character across physical and technological forms through custom storytelling interfaces (TouchOSC, Isadora, Ableton, Arduino), which performers manipulate in real time, controlling video, lighting, and amplified voice while under continuous webcam surveillance.

In dialogue with this technological mirror, identity emerges through the tension between the way we see ourselves and the ways we perform for and are seen by others. We created a shared imaging system built from two networked iPads divides control between performer and audience. Orlando directs the camera across her own body while the audience determines the moment of capture. The images appear instantly in projection, then fragment into digital glitches as they are revisited, leaving unstable traces rather than fixed portraits. Identity here is not singular or stable, but continuously negotiated through authorship, surveillance, and the dynamics of the gaze.