This blog is a little longer than normal and I have divided it into a few sections.

This mostly serves as my own archive but I do hope someone out there in the digital ether finds something of use in the weeds.

RECENT EVENTS
I’ve spent the last few weeks travelling for work, beginning with a two week stint in Adelaide on Kaurna Country working on two collaborations with Kinetic Collective. Causal Nexus and My Hair is Thinning. The following tw0 weeks were spent on Gadigal land at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists as part of their Play Process Experiment Lab.

Causal Nexus is an improvisational performance work directed by Clara Solly-Slade with Mat Morison, Zoë Dunwoodie and I creating an improvised performance within a cybernetic feedback loop where techno and body effect and affect.

We had our first development as part of Australian Dance Theatres ADT RAW residency, having 3 hours of studio time to prepare a 10 minute viewing.

My role is somewhere between systems designer and performance artist.

This has been a great outlet for my research into posthumanism and cybernetics. My goal with the project is to explore and demonstrate posthuman entanglements that emerge from cybernetic systems and feedback loops. Inputs and outputs are shared between musician, dancer, techno-human and computer, creating the conditions to explore the posthuman concept of ‘becoming’ as the physical and technological entanglements act as a site for emergent improvisation to occur.

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I am also planning to use machine learning reinforcement loops to train an algorithm that mediates the improvisational parameters, seeking patterns and reinforcing behaviours that emerge through the improvisation itself.

The development came together fairly fast, Clara, Mat, Zoë and I had been sharing ideas and excitement leading up to our time in the studio. After an initial exploration where Mat and I linked Touchdesigner sets and did some human theremin “wave your hands around and shit happens” experiments with Zoë, Clara suggested we unwind from the tech and try a more physical approach. Mat improvised on a Piano, I held two lights on sticks in my hand and Zoë ducked and weaved us together through movement and play.

A basic story structure (the heroes journey) was used to guide our improvisation. I’m toying with the idea of the heroes journey structure eventually forming the basis of the machine learning algorithm, reinforcing patterns and behaviours in relation to the story outline and comparing differences and similarities across each loop.

For our viewing we added a guitar with a motion sensor, a stage-box containing a contact microphone, a light sensor (zig-sim app on a phone) and an infrared web camera. These allowed light detection, motion and audio entanglements.

We had a basic rule set on how to behave. My role was to light Zoë (who was wearing the light sensor) and Mat with the two lights attached to my arms. Mat’s goal was to compose music through their various devices in response to Zoë and I, and Zoë acted as a de-facto protagonist; utilising embodied knowledge and improvisational flow to weave the techno and human performance together.

I have had minimal live performance experience outside of my I Hate Max music project and Gorilla Man, both of which I perform as a heightened, brat and angst riddled avatar of myself (and a Gorilla). It took a few goes for me to shed the persona and offer a more sincere and grounded performance. This is something I have been wanting to explore deeper. I’m quite obsessed over the behavioural changes algorithms are causing and I would like to harness my own body to experiment and demonstrate this algorithmic entanglement our bodies are held hostage within.

Causal Nexus will continue with a two week development as part of Adelaide Festival Centres INSPACE residency in 2025.

The next two weeks saw Clara and I jet off to Sydney to take part in the Play Process Experiment program at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists to develop our new work Ek-kO as part of the PACT PPE lab with 6 other participants developing new works.

Ek-kO is a performance work that explores the way we relate and empathise with digital avatars when the medium of communication is controlled by billionaire technocrats. Not content with colonising earth and it’s inhabitants, Ek-kO imagines a world where the remaining discards of humanity compete to gain a spot on the next starship to Mars. Two performance artists are pit against each other through a voting app where audiences rank each Ek-kO against abstract statements. “WHICH Ek-kO WILL TAKE US THERE?”, “WHICH Ek-kO HAS MAXIMUM FERTILITY?”. The looser is blended up into flesh/soup and the winner is crowned and sent to Mars. The statements are pulled from Elon Musk, Donald Trump and an assortment of billionaires from the internet.

As much as the PPE lab was about developing Ek-kO it was also aimed at gaining creative development skills and techniques to help with our creative practice. This involved mentorship by a number of mentors who practiced in Dance, Vocal training, Acting, Creative Technology and Design. The project shifted through a few iterations, beginning as a choose your own adventure style game involving digital avatars and pre-recorded/live human interactions. This felt too much like a tech demo and the inclusion of Clara and Myself as performers gave the work a fleshy life that it was missing.

Ek-kO is conceptually grounded in behavioural algorithms and the effect the platforms that we use to communicate has on our ability to empathise and relate. I keep coming back to an image I saw of dead children in gaza on Instagram, which had thousands of love heart reactions. This low resolution, compressed and inadequate means of communication has stuck with me. Content to be sacrificed to the silicon valley. Rows of servers mediating our interactions and understanding of the world.

Algorithmic doubling and predictive models are another core concept to Ek-kO. When you use platforms like Facebook and TikTok you are cloned into an algorithm that doubles your actions, feeding this information into a predictive model, which serves you an endless scroll of content that is reinforced if a users behaviour matches the predicted behaviour. This echo chamber effect is popularised as the X to Far Right pipeline, or wOkE Twitter.

Due to the nature of the lab Clara and Myself had to stand in for the performance, which in an ideal world would be a role taken on by a dancer. It was an interesting challenge to put the theories I have been reading about on embodiment and performance to use. We did a particularly impactful exercise on cultural practice with Tammi Gissell. This involved embodying our environment, culture, family and intentions into a repetitive movement piece. It felt like the first time I have really understood what embodiment is (one might say I embodied the knowledge!) and it really helped me break out of my ‘I Hate Max’ performance persona and draw upon something genuine.

I am going into the new year excited about continuing to incorporate performance and movement into my practice and the next development of both Causal Nexus and Ek-kO.

THOUGHTS

machine yearning technoflesh
in a cannibalization
incrypted by algorhythm
i dance
strange shapes exchange

Consuming, serving, cannibalised technoflesh, feeding, offering, exchanging technoflesh.

Flesh in digital, low resolution flesh, bite sized snacks, what a spectacle, it’s all math.

The flesh dissected into metadata cannibalised as context over dinner.

Reading List

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities By Poppy Wilde – This was a bit dense, but had a really good explanation of Posthumanist theory in the opening half. This book explores Poshuman subjectivities that emerge, using world of warcraft as a vessel to explore what it ‘feels’ like to be posthuman. The author relates method acting and performance to avatar/gamer entanglement, discussing the shared subjectivity between character, avatar, world (director, writer) and actor/gamer. Interesting book.

Vurt By Jeff Noon – Vurt is one of my favorite SciFi stories, following a group of punks in their descent into a psychedelic drug world that is enmeshed with our own. Jeff Noon plays with language, drawing from his life as a DJ to remix, shuffle and edit words. The prefer the other two books in the series, Pollen and Nymphomation. Nymphomation especially, I’ll do a proper write up on that when I re-read it next.

Cobralingus By Jeff Noon – I managed to get a copy of Cobralingus recently, it wasn’t widely printed. Jeff Noon alters a series of short stories using his Cobralingus Engine; a writing technique where words are randomised, distorted, reformed, remixed and unified using a variety of techniques. It’s hard to explain. Each section acts as a ‘how to’ while also demonstrating how the deconstruction can be used to creative narrative across each form of the text.