A Performance Piece That Required a Fencing Coach and a Sex Doll Maker

“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.

Number of people involved: Over 40, including those from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which co-commissioned the work alongside the Luminato Festival Toronto, and Phi Studio, a Montreal production company.

Time from commission to performance: Six months.

From noon to 9 on a Wednesday this past June, the Canadian artist Miles Greenberg, 26, stood in Walker Court at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and sliced the air with swords and daggers. Instead of dueling a human opponent, he squared off against a camera held by a robotic arm that countered and recorded his movements. All around him, strewn across the mirrored floor, were nine uncanny silicone sculptures of his likeness positioned as if they’d already been slain. Occasionally the artist stabbed one of his clones, picking up its weapon before reassuming his position in front of the camera.

Greenberg, who has made his name with elaborate performance pieces that emphasize the body and how it changes yet perseveres over what’s often a grueling period, found inspiration for “Respawn” (2024) in R.P.G.s, or role-playing video games. Every hour on the hour, a disembodied voice interrupted the soundtrack’s progressively deepening ambient bass drone to announce, “Level 1,” “Level 2” and so on. Additionally, the camera footage, which was projected on two monitors outside of the court and will live on as a video work, mimicked the perspective of a gamer sitting on their couch. The artist saw a parallel between the many lives of R.P.G. characters and how, in our own lives, we dispense with versions of ourselves as we evolve. The more exhausted he became, though, the more compassion he had for his corpselike clones. “I ended up feeling very held by them,” he says — just as he did, in a different sense, by the people behind the scenes.