Melisa Ince

This short performative and interactive film captures achieving a state of Non-Self through the digital technique: green screen. People often have a sense of Self – whether this comes from beliefs of a soul, your consciousness, or your continuous internal monologue developing a feeling of a passenger existing inside of your body.The Non-Self regards the proposition that we are all merely a flux of changing mental contents occurring at an immediate speed : a concentration of energy in a space. This alludes to the idea of the Self existing as an illusion.

The green screen effect removes my head throughout this film as an area which I associate  with most to a sense of Self – or have done so in the past. I interact with the viewer by welcoming them into a journey in (digitally) experiencing the Non-Self with me. Once I paint the viewer in green, similarly, to  digitally remove them, we enter a space that depicts shapes I associate to the Self. However, these shapes are shadow projections. Shadows symbolise illusion in my work – in the way they can deceive one of an object’s true size, colour, shape, distance, etc. The piece ends in entering the space of illusions of Self.

In conclusion, through experiencing the Non-Self, we enter a realisation of the Self potentially existing as an illusion.