Simone Forti
American, born Italy, 1935
Simone Forti was better known as an avant-garde dancer and choreographer when, in the mid-1970s, she was offered the opportunity to work with Lloyd G. Cross, a physicist and the inventor of moving holographs. In the decade prior, Forti radically reimagined dance as a democratic art form, replacing the complexities of traditional choreography with basic, everyday movements. For her collaboration with Cross, Forti performed such simple, improvisatory gestures—including standing, striding, and crawling—on a black stage. The recordings of these performances then served as the basis for a series of innovative sculptures, including Harmonics (3). Its softly flickering images of the artist walking across the stage in a figure eight and waving her arms are a composite of frames selected from Forti’s filmed performance. The process of translating this footage into the final hologram introduced “glitches” that occasionally transform the artist’s body into new and unexpected abstract forms, offering Forti further opportunities to push the limits of representing the human form.