3M0T1NG|«/n3tw0rk1ng», 2023
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performance Isis Andreatta, Juan Pablo Cámara, Ahmed El Gendy, Forough Fami, Lucas Lagomarsino, Alina Ruiz Folini, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Charlie Laban Trier, Simone Gisela Weber, & Jakob Wittkowsky
music Li Yilei
costume Dynno Dada
makeup Grizolda & Queen of Virginity
technical Bram Snijders
outside-eye Setareh Fatehi & Elisa Zuppini
mentorship Erin Manning
Maclean MC-773 & Maclean MC-825 straps, three Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphones, iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone X, four Optoma short-throw beamers, datapath, TP-Link router, XXL hanging gray projection mesh
Synthetic sapphire lenses and/or/are/our eyes: contacting, capturing, caressing bodies and selves in proximity. (Un)seeing eyeballs and smartphones as “technological prostheses” prompts new dimensionality for flesh and (virtual) enmeshment. Representations pulsate and scan through embodiment with satellitic signal. Which spacetime emerges from recoding the “I/i” in transindividual? Proposed is a technogenetic matrix for rehearsing a ceremonial articulation of this inquiry. 3M0T1NG features dancing collaborators within a human-body(-[trans]individual) equation in which imaging devices and web semiotics backdrop vocabularies for emo-techno-social soma. The research speculates about simulations of eye-contact and (non-)complex images, disconnecting essentialized “truths” from feelings and expressions. Rendered are psychic dissociations from normative emotionality, re-manifesting (or “queering”) inter-relational communications in “real” (hallucinatory) and virtual (computed) time.
A [2-player] performance-test with Charlie Laban Trier, performed for Y: NORMAL BODIES at Divadlo X10 in Prague (documentation images © Marek Koliha) preceded a [4-player] 3M0T1NG [process] for Studio Showings 2022 at DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam (documentation images © Thomas Lenden) with Isis Andreatta, Ahmed El Gendy, and Jakob Wittkowsky. A solo [satellitic] 3M0T1NG occurred at the Integration and Testing Laboratory of INPE (curated by Fabiane M. Borges), Brazil’s space research and technology center. Support for research begins with DAS Choreography and continues via the Saison Foundation (Tokyo), SACi-E / National Institute for Space Research (São José dos Campos), IDlab – Academie voor Theater en Dans (Amsterdam), and Fonds Darstellende Künste (Berlin). [6-player] 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} pre-premiered at Uferstudios in Berlin (documentation images © Alicja Hoppel and Jelly Luise, and video © Walter Bickmann from Tanzforum Berlin) in Dec. 2022 with Juan Pablo Cámara, Forough Fami, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Simone Gisela Weber, and Jakob Wittkowsky, supported by NPN-STEPPING OUT (Munich). The work and research culminate with DAS Choreography 2023 - ‘A Choice Among Others,’ supported by the Aart Janszen Fonds (Amsterdam).
“What form have connections taken? What substance did they have? And in the future? 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} demonstrates that whether or not it is emotion that is ‘put on,’ some such signals are necessary to able to think about how to understand and respond to each other, and thus to connect. This process is put into hyperdrive through the projection of the bodies' screens. The reflections compound and float free of their objects. The more the performers try to embody this virtual condition, the appearance of expressivity and emotion increases, but its meaning is less to be found. The performers, and performance, become their own emotional blocks. Yet, aware as the audience always is of bodies moving around and responding to each other on stage, emotions continue to take nascent shape in the space between those bodies and how they represent themselves (on the body or the screen). It is through this space that we have been encountering difference (including in ourselves), feeling something, and forming new connections—🧬.”
— Michael Amico, PhD, researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development
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