I Dreamed Medusa

Claudia Hart, I Dreamed Medusa,  2015

I made I Dreamed Medusa in 2015, as part of an augmented-reality installation produced with my School of the Art Institute students at the Museum. I used Antonio Canova’s sculpture, Head of Medusa (1801), an important part of the AIC collection, as an augmented-reality “trackable.”  Through our Romantic App, users could see the piece playing on the surface of the sculpture. I used “medusa,” because it is the symbol of all things feminine, of  the queen, and is a form of the Greek word metis - “feminine wile” - that which the male gods strove to obtain. I Dreamed Medusa is actually a selfie video, projected in my digital software onto a 3D computer-model that I also sculpted there, both  inspired by the original Canova masterpiece.