I'm a mirrorball

When the world is ending but you gotta check all the mirrors/reflective surfaces just in case this is a vampire game too.

Nude, Jonas Stand before the live audience examining the surface of her body methodically, from top to bottom, with small vanity mirror. The title, Mirror Check, places an emphasis on the visual on the self-conscious staging of the performer’s body, under examination. Femininity-as-display is put into tension with the invocation of an everyday self-conscious personal “checking” in the mirror to ensure a flawless mask of femininity for the world. At the same time, an aural framing overwrites this visual training in the maintenance of femininity: Mirror Check suggests the technical “testing” of sound equipment, the “sound check” that precedes a musical presentation. “Check, check, check, one, two, one two” is part of the perperformance preparations often conducted in front of the live audience. Furthermore, the soundtrack for Mirror Check is the low hiss of white noise. Although we see a visual image, transmission is simultaneously also empty, or, in Raymond Williams’ terms, without content: abstract. Like Paik’s various attempts to disrupt the transmission of televisual content on a visual level, the failure an aural connection draws out attention to sound-as-transmission--the realm of Echo-- and this at the same time marks the emptiness of transmission as a form. Thus the female nude is, at the outset, juxtaposed with abstraction-as-transmission in an asymmetrical staging of image and sound. On completing her Mirror Check, Jonas walks off stage; the camera shifts stage right to reveal a large television monitor. Two other performers than carry around the stage mirror that has the same dimensions as the TV monitor; it is walked across the stage facing outward to reflect the audience, before a camera person, Babetter Mangolte, appears on the stage.

/