Quote from Professor Susan Chevlowe's Essay:

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Multimedia was indispensable in creating a tension between a real and a virtual space in which the bride and bridegroom were spiritually, emotionally and physically transformed. Postmodern Jewish Wedding begins with the procession of the bride and bridegroom—a choreographed performance during which biblical texts were projected onto their bodies, transfiguring them, while marking the body as the nexus of experience,  Shiff became “a holographic bride,” an effect achieved by a video projected through the folds of her veil. The text was selected from the Torah portion of Hayei Sarah, in which Rebecca veiled herself before Isaac (Gen. 24:65). Kaplan became a Torah—“the embodiment of the text”—as random passages were fast forwarded across his body. ​

Link to full essay

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Select Video Elements Projected onto the Wedding Canopy​

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Zahkor, Remembering our Ancestors

     The Hebrew word Zahkor (Remember) is crucial to our lives and it projects the past into the present and the future. In some Jewish wedding ceremonies, one is supposed to honor and remember ones ancestors. Instead of merely conjuring up the memory of those that have left us in the mind’s eye, Shiff and Kaplan decided to create a visual representation of our respective family members who have passed away by using photos of them and projecting their ancestors onto the Chuppah so that their larger than life images hovered above them watching over their celebration, if only for a moment, and then receding back into the void.

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Rewriting Deuteronomy

     Shiff and Kaplan felt that it was very important to mark and transform those aspects of their Jewish inheritance that are based on patriarchal rule and the oppression of women. That is why they decided to rewrite this offensive passage in the Bible about marriage rites and the control of woman’s sexuality at their wedding ceremony. Unlike the harsh verdict of Deuteronomy, they decided to cast off the words of patriarchy and injustice with the aid of the software program Aftereffects, to be left with free-floating signs from which to create poetry. In the end, the new text is incorporated into the Torah symbolically indexing the sacred text as permeable and permutable.