Entry into the project was not aesthetic, but extremely affective

Experience

Dead body — experience of collision with corporeality that has lost the function of life.
Structure is intact, but function is irreversibly absent. Extreme physical reality where matter remains, but vector toward future is absent. It's still full in physical sense (body hasn't disappeared), but empty as carrier of presence. Here emptiness is total: body is no longer subject or object, but sediment of life. This is encounter with impossibility of feedback.
Non-living body (mannequin / digital avatar) — body is not emptied, but initially empty.
Structure is available for filling, but doesn't presuppose initial life. Its emptiness is not tragic, but constructive: it's with possibility of being "inhabited" by alien affect or its imitation. This is experience of potentiality without experience.

Crack in habitual experience

This is loss that has already occurred.
This is potential that will never become life.

Why they linked

Connection arises from contrastive kinship.
In both cases, body ceases to be transparent mediator of life. It becomes an object that needs interpretation.
But their emptinesses are different.

Difference — in vector of this emptiness: after life / before life.

Absence of subjectivity can be simultaneously final and potential, and in digital body it becomes operational resource for generating new affective experience.

Two emptinesses

These two experiences converge at a point where absence of subjectivity becomes material.
They're connected not by similarity of form, but by common tension: body without "I" that nevertheless structures relation to itself.

Jess arises in this linkage as third figure — digital body, not imitating life, but modeling possibility of being touched while remaining empty.
Her affect — not expression, but glitch: trembling of form that belongs to no one.

So emptiness after and emptiness before fold into new type of presence — emptiness that looks back.

Jess — between

Figure of intermedium — mediator between absence and presence.
She has no life of her own, but she structures experience so that you begin to feel her as "other side" of gaze.

Attention not on content, but on what emptiness holds form.

Experience of distance

Irreversibility of dead body and potentiality of non-living body are held together,
creating tension that in contemplation is perceived as trial of unthinkable.

It is precisely the intertwining of loss and potentiality that creates unique affective knot,
from which the project grows: emptiness that is simultaneously closed and open.