In a dark room with a staircase at its center, two nude figures and two figures wearing goggles and capes are present. The goggles present a cinematic visual field in which the perspectives of everyone in the room—including the wearer’s own—are switched in real time in response to the positions of their bodies and the surrounding situation. Through this shifting vision, the two goggled figures observe the nude bodies and move through the dark room. At times, the nude figures put on a third pair of goggles and join the side of the viewers.

The title alludes to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, but here Nude becomes the plural Nudes, while descending is reconfigured as sensing and moving. In Nudes Moving on a Staircase, one closes one’s eyes and, upon opening them again, finds that the visual field has changed. Yet what appears is not an entirely different shot, but another person’s framing of a space and of objects of consciousness held in common. The ordinary perceptual inertia that binds the moments before and after a blink is thus literally overlaid with montage, which binds shot to shot through meaning. The fragmented images of skin captured by one eye of the goggle-mounted camera are cut both by the evenly spaced clocking of the display and by blinks—acts performed mostly unconsciously, though at times deliberately. Through these two modes of interruption, they come to “exist” before the viewer’s body as moving, living images. The desires and politics surrounding cinema are thus folded back, quite literally, into the micropolitics between participants and performers inhabiting the same space.