Kate Cooper’s videos explore how bodies are imagined and imaged, understood and controlled, and how they resist. She is interested in what a moving image can do as a visual somatic experience, instead of what it represents, considering the body as a contested site where conflicts between subject and object, image and flesh, play out. Since 2014, her work has evolved through the use of CGI technology, addressing the representation of women’s bodies in popular culture and consumer advertising and how images of bodies are produced within the violence of capitalist labour relations.  Cooper’s more recent works lean into abstraction by reproducing and manipulating the language of medical imaging techniques.

Infection Drivers (2018) presents a body in conflict with itself, centring on a computer-generated woman wearing a translucent bodysuit that inflates and deflates, with her naked body visible underneath. The suit evokes exaggerated stereotypes of gendered bodies, shifting between masculine and feminine form, suggesting the virtual malleability of gender and identity. The possibility of perfect gendered form gives way to the body’s corporeality as it appears bruised, scratched, unwell and struggling to breathe. Through the use of CGI technology, Cooper challenges accepted understandings of the body’s limitations and proposes the stark digital landscape as a battleground for subjectivity.

In Untitled (After Somatic Aliasing) (2022), Cooper draws from the visual language of MRI scans, depicting bodily fragments in perpetual motion, which move in and out of focus, in constant repetition. The work’s visual and aural logic is drawn from the vocal and physical stimming that helps neurodiverse people to self-regulate in response to overstimulation. The movement of the image is rhythmic and soothing, combined with foley sounds that together produce bodily ‘affect’ akin to stimming. The effect of stimming is considered by Cooper as a strategy of refusal—a refusal to partake in a society marked by physical exhaustion and the conditions imposed by capitalism. The imaged body is an ‘alias’, a stand in for the physical body, but also refers to ‘temporal aliasing,’ a visual error where moving images captured too slowly appear to stutter, change speed, or even move backwards. Cooper brings the viewer into this digital body’s somatic experience, asking us to feel its internal sensations—breathing, aching, pulsing—to imagine how we might ourselves defy the aesthetic, productive, and political regimes our bodies are subject to.