“That night, lying in my bed, I heard from beyond the hedge where he had emerged sounds of incredible agony ; he must have found his prey ; but the fox is in nature…. I am not in nature…. To me, the world is cracked, unwhole, not pure, accidental ; and the idea of moments of joy for no reason is very strange.” –Jamaica Kincaid
Monsters engages in transdisciplinary research as an affirmative practice. It explores the inexhaustible potential and interconnectedness of all that lives through the experimental staging of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964).
Aiming for a mise-en-scène as experimental as Lispector’s writing, Monsters will be a biopolitical sound fiction from the performers’ biometrics surrendered to the Earth, searching for non-metaphoric ways of becoming-animal, becoming-insect, becoming-nature, resulting in an artistic proposition that unfolds into explorations of Human/Technology/Nature relatedness.
The team will be composed of the author of this presentation (performer-researcher), the actress Rachel Gordy (G.H.), the scientific researcher psychiatrist hypnotherapist Dr Lakshmi Waber, the sound artist and computer programmer of neurobiological sensors Daniel Zea and the visual artist Avian D'Souza.
The plot revolves around a seemingly banal event that causes a lightning internal tremor in the life of G.H., an artist living in Copacabana, a chic district of Rio de Janeiro, when she enters the housekeeper's bedroom to clean up after she left. There,G.H. discovers a cockroach in a cupboard, which she tries in vain to squash with a blow from the door. Faced with the dying insect, G.H. plunges into an existential crisis that takes her into the depths of creation, beyond the limbo of language and the unconscious.
Accompanied on stage by a sort of mirror, an alter ego, or perhaps a distant relative reminiscent of Kafka's Gregory Samsa, whom for the purpose of the work we will call L’Autre, Monsters will explore how becoming-nature is processual, passing through the destabilisation of the self and the exploration of one's 'alterity within', a creative process of techno-human-nature intra-actions where 'even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude', embraced in what constitutes the process of making an artwork. This project aims to artistically apply the concepts of Karen Barad's Meeting The Universe Halfway (2007) by experimenting with wearable biosensors, portable EEG devices and immersive virtual reality (iVR) as performative tools, allowing the body as instrument to intra-act with nature, imagining ways of agencying the environment, conceived as a set of dynamic forces in constant exchange and diffraction, with properties other than the purely humanly embedded.
“A whole lifetime of awareness – for fifteen centuries I hadn’t struggled, for fifteen centuries I haven’t killed, for fifteen centuries I hadn’t died – a whole lifetime of tamed awareness was now collecting inside me and banging like a mute bell whose vibrations I didn’t need to hear, I was recognising them. As if for the first time I was finally on the level of Nature.”
–Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
To situate the performer as a subversive subject in the process of becoming is to extend the limits of the subject, to become animal, insect (Deleuze's favourites and the best musicians!), to become molecular and imperceptible, to cross a threshold and reach intensities.[i] To carry out this contradiction (most of us we have been classically-trained to ‘shine’ after all), the counter-resistance that is at the heart of love[ii] requires us to extend Foucault’s concept of bio-power[iii] to the body as an incessant inscribing instrument, crossed by a technology with which we have a conflictual relationship, that is, between being an essential instrumental and anthropological support for humanity, and a recipe for collapse.
This creative walk on the wild side in which “the human body itself is no longer part of ‘the family of man’, but a zoo of posthumanities”[iv] deterritorialises artistic practices by exploring the performative potential of body and mind. Through hypnosis and meditation, and by exploring states of excitement and stress, isolation and fasting, the artists will access altered states of consciousness under the guidance of psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Dr Lakshmi Waber. The captured sensible/sensitive data by neurobiological sensors will determine the audio-visual parameters of the work, programmed by Daniel Zea – who will also conceive the sound landscape of the work – and visual artist Avian D'Souza, who will elaborate the video projection and mapping onto the performers. Aiming for an earthly embedded and technologically mediated performance, the devices involved in this project are thus designed to support the transformation of the bodily self into an 'earthly instrument' that becomes imperceptible and unemphasised.
This project will explain the results of an earlier collaboration between scientific and artistic researchers in the dance piece Aria (2022) and will historically inform the new case study Monsters. It will do this by drawing on a major work in the repertoire of neurofeedback sonification : Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer (1965), and by summarising the use of biosensors in the arts. The presentation will also give a historical summary of the interaction between hypnosis and the arts since Mesmer and the use of the glass armonica in the second half of the 18th century. With a creation date scheduled for early 2026, at the time of the conference Monsters will be in a phase of development where the first experiments with neurobiological sensors will have taken place, as well as the first sessions of the performers (characters of G.H. and L'Autre) with Dr Waber, where we will explore the text under hypnosis and different scenic expressions and experimentations under trance.
[i] Deleuze Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
[ii] Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
[iii] Foucault Michel, Daniel Defert, Graham Burchell and Collège de France. 2014. Lectures on the Will to Know : Lectures at the College De France 1970-1971 and Oedipal Knowledge First Picador ed. New York NY: Picador.
[iv] Halberstam Jack ; Halberstam Judith and Ira M. & Livingston. 1995. Posthuman Bodies. Unnatural Acts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Example of previous artistic research outcome : Audio Article
https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/399/515
