Ana Benlloch is an artist based in London, UK who is currently researching towards a PhD in Participant Relations in Avatar Performance Art at Birmingham City University (Birmingham Institute of Art and Design). She gained her MA from Chelsea College in 2002 and was the Fellow in Digital and Time-Based Media at BIAD from 2004-2005.
She is developing a type of avatar performance where participants are engaging with, and taking on, ritualistic and symbolic personas. This interaction could be digital or corporeal, and often explores a sacrifice of the self to the other, the group, or to an idea. This refers to the origins of performance as a sacred act that allows contact with other worlds in order to change this one. Her work explores how the leakage between physical and digital selves affects interpersonal dynamics across mobile communications, the internet and in simulated worlds. ‘Hacking’ how this virtual space is used can become a way of challenging and subverting the boundaries of everyday relations and desires, consumption and power.
She also writes reviews, fiction and art writing, often as part of a performance fiction.
