Abstract

xeno/exo/astro-choreoreadings is a postdoctoral artistic research project that explores research questions that reopen site- and place-responsive choreographic practices by expanding the notions of ‘site’ and ‘place’ to outer space. The prefixes in the title refer to planetary conditions to which I do not have direct access. Another key choreographic exploration focuses on embodying hyper-reading and examining the impact of digital reading on embodied artistic practice. Hyper-reading refers to a computer-assisted, screen-based reading practice that has become common in contemporary daily life globally. It connects the reader to the limitless cyberspace. The research project blends these two spatial dimensions, in which the examination of the notions of choreography and ‘choreoreading’ happen. The research process is multidisciplinary and hybrid in nature, producing artworks, traces, and reflections. The results are presented in this exposition as artworks and as reflections on the choreographic practice that this process has clarified.

‘Choreoreading’ is a practice I developed during my doctoral artistic research project (Kellokumpu 2019), and this postdoctoral project continues to develop the conceptual and practical understanding of that practice, with a focus on hyper-reading in relation to artistic research, hyper-reading-elements and their embodied connections to choreography. The main objective of the project is to imagine and develop new perspectives on place- and site-responsive choreographic practices, and generate artworks that emerge from engagement with critical materials coming from the fields such as science fiction, astrobiology, astronomical data, and queer theory.

The field of what I call here ‘space art’ is vast and rich, and this project and exposition reference only a small part of the possible works to consider. The primary references come from the fields of performing and contemporary art. The purpose of this exposition is to materialize the artistic research journey into spatial dimensions and intensities that are impossible for me to reach directly and to reflect on what outer space and interplanetary scales entail for a choreographic orientation and practice. To name just a few contemporary artworks and speculative fiction, which have served as artistic references, consider Piero Manzoni’s Socle du Monde (1961), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), David Bowie’s Space Oddity (1972), Alexandra Mir’s First Woman on the Moon (1989), Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (1974), Anna Halprin’s Planetary Dance (1980–), and Claire Denis’s film High Life (2018). Among works by domestic creators, projects such as Kari Yli-Annala’s Trip to the Moon (1996), Minna Långström’s Mars, Behind the Images (2019), and Flis Holland’s Subserotic Bulge (2019) have also been important artistic interlocutors in my process. In terms of academic, artistic, and scientific research, the project has been affected by Ellen Røed’s artistic research project ‘Skyvelære’ where science and art collaborate (2014), Otso Huopaniemi’s doctoral artistic research (2018) on the interaction of humans and technologies in the context of writing, Lisa Messeri’s anthropological perspectives on placing outer space (2016), Kirsi Monni’s (2024) articulations on choreography, Jana Unmüssig’s (2023) writing about the pedagogy of expanded choreography, and Leena Rouhiainen and Kirsi Heimonen’s reflections on the relationship between writing and artistic practice (2024). Regarding the intersection of art and critical theory in the frameworks of artistic research, this project continues to explore how artistic practice can develop its own theory — or can it? The project couples with expanded choreography (Leon 2022), and in reconsidering choreography as something other than the practice of construction. The notion of ‘struction’, articulated by French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau (2014), has a significant influence on the artistic practice and materialization of the works.

Choreoreader and Hyper-reader

Highlighting choreography as a form of writing is supported by its linguistic roots. The historical evolution, intent, and function of dance notation systems reinforce this view. However, notation is not only meant to be written. It must also be read to serve as guidance for movement. Viewing choreography as an act of reading can likewise be grounded in the same historical context of development of dance notations. The point at which movement, spatiality, and written symbols converge into choreographic writing (Foster 2011: 17) can also be seen as the moment when choreographers were expected to develop the ability to interpret these notations. While writing and reading are not entirely distinct physical acts but rather deeply interconnected, it remains important to consider what new choreo-potentials arise when the focus shifts from writing to reading. This is particularly relevant given choreography’s evolution beyond strictly human-centered frameworks and now encompassing non-human actors, everyday interactions, virtual environments, and discursive spaces (Foster 2011: 2–3). As such, choreography, or better yet diverse understanding of choreographies, functions not merely as a structured human activity imposed on bodies, but as a method for reflecting, and critically materializing the socio-ecological systems, relations, and frameworks within which bodies take place and move.

One of the most compelling and influential theoretical concepts I have drawn from literary studies is the idea of hyper-reading, introduced by American scholar James J. Sosnoski. In his 1999 essay ‘Hyper-readers and their Reading Engines’, Sosnoski explores how digital, electronic, and computer-assisted technologies have transformed the act of reading. This concept resonates strongly with my own experience, as my daily life is saturated with digital text, emails, messages, and online publications. I spend more time browsing the web than engaging with printed materials. Sosnoski’s writing provides a valuable framework for understanding reading within the context of the technological environment that shapes both my life and my artistic practice. In the exposition’s landing page, I have taken characteristics of hyper-reading by Sosnoski and turned them to playful scores.

The practice of hyper-reading has been developed and researched more recently by several scholars, e.g., N. Katherine Hayles (2010), Maryanne Wolf (2019), Anne Mangen and Antti Pirhonen (2022) and Ziming Liu (2022). My starting points for this research project’s artworks lie in the transition from traditional print media to digital platforms, which is reshaping reading and writing habits by introducing interactivity and multimedia elements, seamlessly integrated into digital hypertexts. In my experience, this shift affects also choreographic thinking. 

The hyper-reader appears to me as a dynamic, deconstructive, and reassembling cybernaut. It is an agent that sparks both my imagination and creative process. Techniques like hyperlinking, copy-pasting, and random selection has become useful ways to articulate a choreoreading practice that is still evolving and taking shape. For me hyper-reading opens access to cyberspace and into the embodied experience of it. Within this embodied choreographic approach, I seek to explore and make sense of dynamic incoherence in which the body takes place in the limitless space. My goal is to develop a practice where the body could operate like a cybernaut, which engages with movement in ways that include observing macro movements, witnessing and rapidly re-routing kinesthetic impulses with the mode of reading focusing on what happens during reading, quick imaginary visualizations, and letting go of composed actions, so to speak.

Besides this, I am also interested in finding out what kind of a body hyper-reading produces when taking into speculative outer space conditions. In a practical sense I connect limitless cyberspace with outer space. The common denominator is the liminal, limitless, ungraspable immaterial space which affects choreographic thinking. Through examining such hybridity in this process, the objective is to recognize, build understanding about, and critically analyze, through and with art, the broad cultural and technogenetic shift that is going on. That is why it is important to focus on the human affects, emotions, sensations, movements of the eyes, tactile feelings and design of the screens and the experience of the digital space-realm of internet, visualization of outer space, astrobiological materials, and work with this information-intensive ecology through performative, staged, installed, and choreographic means to be shared with audiences. Considering the notion of embodiment, the project examines and brings forward what kind of human body that could be, which is not yet an avatar, a cyborg, or a code, but which is in dialogue with such extensions while exploring the body-organism of the speculative cybernaut.

I warmly thank all the collaborators and have acknowledged you all in the pages of the works. When it comes to the whole project, I want to thank you, Vincent Roumagnac, for your professional contribution and willingness to have a dialogue with the developing practice and research questions of the project during these years.

My personal work in the project is generously funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the project is supported by the Performing Arts Research Centre, Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki.