February - June 2017
Auto-documentation at the start of transition.
This project began a few days before I started feminizing hormones and ran up until June, 5 months later.
There are two main parts to this project that currently exist. The first was a daily ritual of taking 4 photographs of myself: clothed, semi-nude, full naked, and then my face. In the third and fourth pictures above you can see the example of the form the three full-body photos took in the render I made, and the video (link if the embedded one above doesn't work) is what the face photos looked like all strung together. I've trimmed the part with the full-body shots because 1) I'm not uploading my nudes here and 2) whew big dysphoria hours. While it's fun to see my body very slowly changing, what I enjoy more watching the render back is how much is captured in those photos. In some you can see breakfast, or the screen of my laptop. In one of them I think I'm working on Finding Place.
The second part of the project was a few hours I spent taking videos of my own body, right at the start of transition, which are what the latter photos above come from. This is where I can really see what's changed, not that it's at all evident in the videos themselves. Transition happens at a glacial pace, but looking at myself now I look a world different than I did then. Less hairy, softer, a hell of a lot prettier. It's a shame the old ones are all I have at the moment, I look so much better now. I'll have to do another few hours sometime...
This is the only space I'll give this topic on the site, but I've got to say wow all of the video projects chronologically before this one do make me dysphoric in some kinda way, and it's weird putting them up and it was weird sifting through them but 🤷♀ I guess it's good to acknowledge the past and find the good in it still.
The name “sign test" shows that I was toying with calling the project somthing like “sign". I'd just recently learned about sign/signifier/signified and was still reeling at the ways we perceive and conceptualize the things around us. I was also messing around a lot with being seen and seeing myself. For the body videos I used several mirrors to get angles on myself that weren't normally accessible. And hey, I was reconceptualizing myself.
The project lost steam because the summer establishing ourselves in Albuquerque was very stressful and there just wasn't a spot for setting my phone in a consistent position with good lighting. I'd like to start it up again, but we'll see.