Tracy and the Plastics, a one-woman band with a technological twist, performed in Cabot this week.

Tracy and the Plastics, a riot-grrl band fronted by critically renowned visual artist Wynne Greenwood, WHEN performed at the Cabot House Underground Theatre—but the singer’s bandmates and instruments were nowhere to be found onstage, appearing only on the video screen behind her.

Greenwood is a graduate student at Bard College, who, in addition to writing, performing and recording her own music, produces and stars in her own experimental videos.

Performing as one of a series of visiting artists brought to Harvard by the Office of Arts at Harvard (OFA), Greenwood ambitiously combines her two passions in Tracy and the Plastics, writing and producing movies that correlate in subject matter and rhythm to her songs.

Each of Greenwood’s videos contains a loose narrative centered around her two fictional bandmates, both of whom are played by Greenwood herself.

“I just set up the video camera and push ‘record’ and walk in front of it,” she says.

During live shows, the videos are projected onto a screen behind Greenwood, who sings along to her prerecorded instrumentals.

Her two fictional characters interact with each other onscreen throughout Greenwood’s performances, and in between songs she joins in their conversations, delivering her lines during carefully scripted silences. Such moments reveal how meticulously planned the seemingly spontaneous performances really are. Greenwood’s expert execution implies an exacting level of detail in editing, audiovisual synchronization and scripting, as animation, bits of television commercials, and cardboard cutouts all appear throughout the videos.

Despite the fact that such subject matter varies greatly from video to video, certain themes are continually reinforced throughout all of her work, according to Greenwood.

“It’s about learning to talk the same language as this medium of video,” she explains. “There’s deeper relationships between sound and image, and audience and performer, and media maker and media watcher that don’t get explored or talked about at all, so I’m trying to talk about that stuff. We talk about being gay, about lesbian identity and stuff like that. I’m a feminist, and everything I write comes from that community.”

Although Greenwood has released her music on CD, she feels her videos contribute an essential element to her songs.

“I feel like there’s a lot of imagery in the lyrics, but it’s kind of hard to get that if you’re just listening to it for the first time in a live setting,” she says. “The video hopefully complements it.”

Her second album, Culture For Pigeon, as well as the first Tracy and the Plastics DVD, will soon be released on Chainsaw Records.

Greenwood’s grueling tour schedule, which has kept her on the road since 2001, will only intensify. Over the years, Greenwood has performed to a number of different tapes, since she typically retires a video after each tour.

“It gets sort of boring for me,” she says. “But with every video I make I sit down and do it, and make a new mission statement. I’m in the process of starting to make the next video.”

Her performance at Cabot, which lasted approximately 25 minutes, was set to an older tape that Greenwood says she will not be performing ever again.