Less Ephemeral series
Less Ephemeral series
Digital prints from industrial thermal camera, on Aluminum, Acrylic & Paper. Sizes variable.




Less Ephemeral #3 Honorable Mention, Colorful Abstractions competition.

Much of my work with dancers is an exploration of the ephemeral, impermanent nature of dance, and attempts to find areas of permanence through the use of choreographic sculpture or abstract visualizations created by dancers' movements. This latest series, "Less Ephemeral", employs a complex process where dancers move and press themselves against a thermally-sensitive surface, and are photographed by a high-end industrial thermal camera. The camera captures the residue of the movement over time, as the heat of the dancer's body is applied and then slowly dissipates. I then translate this to the visual realm using a variety of thermal palettes, and create prints of the resulting images on aluminum, acrylic and paper. These are available in limited, numbered series.

Choreographers: Weslie Ching, Kaita Lepore

Dancers: Shelby Lynn Joyce, Kaita Lepore, Nikki Pfeiffer, Weslie Ching, Lauren Serrano

Special thanks to FLiR systems and Austin Richards, for providing the wonderful thermal equipment and expertise that made this work possible.



Making of Less Ephemeral: Excerpts from a session with dancers, shown in multiple color mappings.





"Marco Pinter’s Less Ephemeral series ... reveal[s] haunting visions that reference shifting temporality... Pinter employs an industrial thermal camera to photograph dancers pressing their bodies against a thermally sensitive surface. The resulting image shows the application and fading heat of corporeal movement over time. While the appearance of heat in Pinter’s work seems purely aesthetic, viewed in this geological period, the image can also register as something more than formal information. In a larger sense, the visualization of heat in an age of planetary warming may be interpreted as political."

- Maiza Hixson, curatorial statement for "Greetings from the Anthropocene", Gallery 110, Seattle.