MICHAŁ STANKIEWICZ’S “BEING IN YOU” – ABSENT PRESENCE
What remains of a person when their life comes to an end? Michał Stankiewicz looks for an answer in Being in You, a Polish immersive project about (and co-created by) Cat Janice, the US singer and geologist who died in 2024. Through mixed reality technology, the artist offers an unusual encounter with the memory of another person. The project had its world premiere in the Venice Immersive competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Afterwards it has been included in the programme of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where it is going to compete in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction in November.
Being in You escapes all traditional film categories. It combines documentary testimony with performance, theatre, and the opportunities provided by new media, making each participant part of the unfolding story. Yet it more than just transports the audience into a digitally recreated world. Stankiewicz inverts the principle on which many immersive experiences are founded. Instead of letting us see the world through the protagonist’s eyes, he invites her to glimpse reality through ours.
The project is inseparable from the life of Cat Janice, born Catherine Janice Ipsan, an American singer, songwriter, and geologist. Her scientific endeavours focused on studying the water cycle and working on ways to predict flooding.
In 2022, she was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. Despite treatment, the disease progressed. In early 2024, when Janice was already under hospice care, she decided to release Dance You Outta My Head. She transferred the rights to her music to her seven-year-old son to provide him with an income from future streams.
The song quickly gained popularity on social media. Users shared it and encouraged others to listen, and the artist’s story reached audiences around the world. In February 2024, Dance You Outta My Head reached number one on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart. It was Janice’s final song, and it became one of the biggest successes of her musical career.
It was not, however, the only artistic project she was developing in the final years of her life. At the same time, she was co-creating a mixed-reality project with Michał Stankiewicz. Together they worked on its concept and script, held conversations, recorded material, and experimented with the forms of presence that can emerge when the human body meets the digital image.
This collaboration is central to understanding Being in You. Janice is not simply a subject whose biography was reconstructed after her death. She helped create the work, and the recordings, music and personal archive she left behind became integral to it.
Work continued after her death. The creators used existing recordings of her voice, photographs, films, and music, as well as 3D scans of places and items connected with her life. These materials made it possible to build a space in which the digital traces of the artist’s life can interact directly with the participant.
In a traditional documentary, the viewer gets to know the subject through images, words, and situations chosen by the director. Immersive cinema goes a step further, letting participants enter the filmed person’s surroundings and sometimes to adopt their perspective. Being in You proposes reversing this relationship. Stankiewicz calls his concept ‘reverse embodiment’. The participant is not meant to take on Cat’s identity. Instead, her digital presence is linked to their body, movement, and senses.
Through mixed reality tech, the physical space blends with images related to the artist’s life. You can see her hands, find yourself in a digitally recreated child’s bedroom or music studio, and visit Topsail Island – a spot on the US coast that was especially important to her. Janice’s interest in the ocean and geology, which accompanied her life beyond music, is reflected in the installation’s visual world.
Yet, what matters most are the simple interactions the participant can perform. Cat encourages them to look at their own hands, to smile, or to breathe in her rhythm for a moment. The digital images respond to these actions, so the body of a living person becomes part of the experience.
“If you smile now, I’ll be in your smile” is one of the project’s guiding ideas. These words capture the heart of the entire artwork. Rather than creating the illusion of fully bringing back a departed person, the artist explores how the traces they leave behind might become part of a new relationship. Stankiewicz does not try to convince participants that technology has conquered death. He is more interested in whether memory can be activated through actions that engage both the imagination and the body.
Being in You is produced by the Betwixt Foundation. The project’s director Michał Stankiewicz is also its main producer while Martyna Nitkowska acts as executive producer. The project was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute and the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, under the Development of Creative Sectors programme run by the Creative Industries Institute. It also received support from the scholarship programme of the City of Warsaw.