Choreographic Fiction
Concretely, the installation unfolds as an immersive environment in which moving images, sculptural components, and atmospheric intensities intertwine to produce a shifting field of perception. A large projection spans eight by four meters on the main wall, showing a close-up of the performer’s eye, filmed through residual water contained within a small metal sculpture, the liquid continuously distorting the gaze as the loop repeats. Facing it, a second projection at body scale casts a video of the performer practicing choreoreading movements directly onto a helmet made of purple plexiglass and metal, which creates a superimposed image where the filmed figure merges with the physical object. This projection produces a layered shadow on the wall, and splits the helmet into three interrelated presences: the sculptural headset, its luminous reflection, and the headset worn by the performer in the video. On the floor, a pad showing a close-up of the performer’s eye and a ritual container are arranged on a circular sheet of transparent pvc, lightly covered in water. Also on the floor, Backgear, equipped with a mechanical breathing system and surrounded by small illuminated synthetic biospheres, appears like a discarded device or the remnant of a body that has burst apart. Vinyl-cut poetic text lines the walls and a white carpet extends across the space, which is lit almost entirely by the purple cast of the large projection. Visitors remove their shoes and may sit in a three-row audience section or move through the installation, encountering the low-volume NASA black-hole recording that emanates from a wireless neck speaker, placed beneath the wall-mounted helmet. A pair of futuristic 1990s sunglasses rests near the projection of the performer, and form a final detail in this constellation of body-ies, images, objects, and atmospheres.
EXOXƎ functions as an intersection of cyber and outer space. It is an intersection, which the entire process aims to explore. Both spaces offer artistic realms that are, in a sense, outside all the places I have physically embodied. Yet simultaneously, they constitute embodied spaces of daily life, feeding into the potential for what I call choreographic fiction.
By this term, I refer to a practice that originates from a studied and practiced, primarily Western and historically bound, choreographic tradition, which is expanded into a new era. Choreographic fiction moves beyond the tangible, into a space where the practical components available to the choreographer are elusive, intangible, and not yet fully present. In this sense, choreographic practice becomes an imaginative bodily state, one that holds radical potential to reroute social, ecological, technological, planetary, and interplanetary relations. Engaging with this mode requires developing new kinds of skills that have yet to emerge.
If choreography is understood as a kind of apparatus that grasps or activates relations, EXOXƎ aims to turn this perspective inside out. When the components that form those relations extend beyond human comprehension or the capacity to fully inhabit them, the relations themselves become fictional and ungraspable. In this project, cyberspace and outer space are placed in relation to one another. The practice of hyper-reading and a kinesthetic orientation toward space offer ways of becoming exposed to these interactive realms, which in turn condition a specific understanding of choreography. Here, cyberspace and outer space are conceived as matters in motion, and the choreographer’s body becomes a porous organism, which is searching for ways to develop artistic senses capable of shaping the near-future of a cyber–outer space choreography.
Whether successful or not, the attempt to reach toward these liminal frontiers already begins to materialize a kind of not-here-yet-ness, a speculative space into which the visitor of the installation is invited. This attempt is what I call choreographic fiction.