what are you trampling on today?_____make space, don't trample_____no space? then submerge and merge!________prepare self to co-compost and join ancestral microorganismic parties___________________DECENTERED HUMAN IS A HAPPY HUMAN___________________________we are but a dancing multispecies collage!_____________MOBILE PORTALS MAKE BORDERS OBSOLETE!_____

KIN MOUNDS

RESEARCH MATTRESS transmedia collaboration series 2024/2025

We engage in sensory unlearnings of anthropocentrism. Through transmedia actions we awaken dormant senses arousing relational experiences with more-than-human entities.

As we move towards working with the soil and away from working the soil, we refute the commodified and “alienated labor” of flora, fauna, pets and microbiota. These more-than-humans whose intelligences were denied and exploited to absorb our pollutants, lick our hands, and fatten our bellies are illustrative of capitalist oppression that plagues the human and more than human alike.

Research Mattress has been supported by Tony Patrick’s ShareLab, Eric Forman Studio, the Tisch Creative Research Grant, and the Catwalk Art Residency.

Caged Waterfall

public performance series, video, sound design, 2024

Skyscraping constructions subjugate water flows, disturb soils and displace microbial communities. What ancient memories and spirits are awakened? Let’s honor and grieve these disintegrations.

Filmed by Judy Lieff and Alice Xiaodi Tang.

Kinder Garden

collaborative research and art installation series, with Fangling Huang, Judy Lieff, Alice Xiaodi Tang, and Danni Wang, 2022/23

Kinder Garden is a mobile portal, a kinder, kin-garden for multispecies justice, connecting disparate time scales and geopolitical landscapes, a way of existing and world-building.

The KinderGarden integrates living materials: mycelium, lichen, and moss, our mentors and ecological elders, with fragments of our technological waste. The Portal-Garden’s adaptability and mobility are metaphors for current migrations of all species, a response to ecological collapse and geopolitical shifts.

Research and prototyping for KinderGarden has been supported by the Tisch Creative Research Grant, exhibited at NYU Shanghai and the Shanghai International Design Festival. We are continually working with Tony Patrick’s Share Lab initiative to envision the future of collaborative worldbuilding.

ROBOTA (44°34'39.5"N 72°14'45.2"W)

performance/single-channel video/sound design, 2022

In a post-human world, a cyborgian entity materializes and experiences an enchanted pond for the first time.

The performance stems from an ecofeminist perspective and references the origin of the word “robota” (derived from “drudgery” and “forced labor”) as well as “robot” (from Karel Čapek’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, Rossum's Universal Robots).

Robota’s cyborgian entity continues its habitual tasks but senses possible liberation in the multisensory, multispecies world in and around the pond.

Europa Film Festival 2024, Barcelona, Spain; BIDEODROMO Experimental Film Festival 2023, Bilbao, Italy, 2023; the Stockholm Film Festival, 2023; the Future Vision Festival, Tokyo and Amsterdam, 2022

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MAMA, SOIL, AND SPIRIT

installation, 2021

MAMA, SOIL, AND SPIRIT expresses the poetry of relationality as I collaborate on an interactive artwork with the soil. Sensors read the soil’s humidity and temperature, and the value inputs shape the dynamics of three reactive animations: Bathing Mamas, Tunnel Mamas, and Deep Time. Within the animations is documentation captured with borescope cameras and a Butoh performance. I evoke animistic mentalities, the dynamism of the microbiome, and technology's relationship to its maternal materials. The screens rest in holes, ontological parasites defined by soil. They are spirit portals revealing the continuum and unity of the above ground and the underground.

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HOLE SOCIETY

art intervention, 2021

HOLE SOCIETY is an art intervention and a video series accompanied by instructions inspired by Fluxus scores. The series forms an abstract narrative of birth-death-regeneration and reveals a web of bureaucratic structures, cultural complexities, and economies that surround soil exploitation.

HOLE SOCIETY is interested in infrastructure where it intersects with soil and relies on holes. It reveals terra firma as a dynamic and living thing and part of a continuum with the life above-ground.

CYBORGIAN ROCK (A PROTO-BOT)

custom chatbot/web-based interactive experience, 2021

The Cyborgian Rock (CR) is a fictional entity experienced via a chatbot and designed to stimulate animistic imagination in users. It is a cyborgian relative of the the Makapansgat pebble. This project explores the untapped potentialities of social presence, which can be defined as the sense of being with another. The CR experience is the opposite of our encounters with consumer techno-products. It does not serve a utilitarian purpose or provide consumerist pleasures. Instead it steers one towards reflections on the more-than-human worlds. The code and algorithms are “handwritten” thus the CR is a proto-bot, not an AI-bot.

Featured on the Coding Train live stream.

Chat with the Cyborgian Rock

PASS BY/PASS THROUGH

live online performance/reactive sound design, 2021

An entity dances with a rock as audience members react. The position of the rock, detected with a gyroscope sensor, is used in Max MSP to create an instrument that responds to rock’s orientation and velocity. This project was made in a NIME workshop with the support from Rudolfo Cosovich and Eric Parren. It is inspired by a Jinen Butoh workshop with Atsushi Takenouchi.