Zander Porter, DAS Choreography, Amsterdam
{{ video-documentation: [4-player] 3M0T1NG: https://vimeo.com/749687235/7d0a5220d7 }}
**(second phase/performance in its four-phase evolution; find phase four at the end of the text)
The writing that follows attempts to unfold (an articulation of) contemporary (dis)embodiment through specified glances at (post-)internet, psycho- versus schizoanalytic relational and affective constructs, schizoid emotionality, and network/device matrices. “Matrices” are denoted as metaphysical, psychosomatic, and mortal/physical/gridded networks of (relational) reality. This writing experiments with form and inquiry, positioning itself in words that seek not ultimate clarification, explanation, or conclusion, desiring towards and with a curiousness, a meandered epistemological, and an otherwise-productive (re-)knowing. Technogenetic (and hormonal) play and transductions for transindividuality on the transparency-obfuscation (or personality/anonymity) binaries arrive as choreographic therapeutics for moving-sensing-feeling-thinking-communicating bodies in a potentiated post-neoliberal matrix. This conceptually kindled matrix queers and re-illustrates “networking,” which inherently invokes the abundance of worlds colonized and controlled by big-tech and social media corporations. Generated is a set of direction-possibilities both written and danced/visualized for a post-internet-bodied world consumed by individualizations and self-captures – desiring instead towards new “ceremonies,” “rituals,” or telepathic forms of care/presence/therapy for being-together technogenetically. The concurrent/ongoing choreographic research/performance 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} peeks into this togetherness as a xeno-spacetime containing relating, cyber-worlding (meta-)selves. In The Undercommons (2013), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write that the “hard materiality of the unreal convinces us that we are surrounded, that we must take possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency, on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but an illusory right to what we do not have” (Moten and Harney 13). Let this virtual hardness not only algorithmically re-possess selves but also dephase such illusory protections/narcissisms. Potentiated, at least, as a start, are isolated, artistic experiments and inquiries for a technogenetic and transindividual under-/xeno-commons of intellectual, relational, therapeutic, queered, and affective play-being-seeing-sensing-plasticizing (body).
Relational matrices organize and depict (object-)bodies in specific constellations and network-maps. These include citizens/subjects, (software) “users,” legal family units/containers/containments, consumers of similar/wedded/monopolized brands, and invited guests/dancers/entities/audiences into a performative (studio) practice/setting, et al. Often at once functional and derived from realms of mathematical precision (e.g., social media network algorithms), a matrix also permeates fixedness as a superstructure (e.g., psychic, cosmic, or hallucinogenic alignments between entities), above and between the hard fleshiness of corporeality. The corporeal thus emerges as an entirely complicated, plural site of psychic, social, mediated, moving, subject(ive), using-used, legal-colonized, consumer-consumed assemblage of bones, organs, sensations, psyches, and emotions. In a sociohistorical and cultural articulation of this complicated corporeal, it is impossible for one matrix not to be always and already enmeshed with other matrices, which is to emphasize the intersectional with regards to identity and its submatrices (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.). In abstracted terms, matrix can operate as a synonym for surrounding, a metaphysical spatiality which leans towards “reality,” leaning towards subjective/personal projection, and perhaps ultimately demarcating differences in sensuality (in how such realities are constructed/“seen”/textured), namely yet not exclusively vision. The performative inquiry and practices proposed by this research seek to interpolate and complicate vision as an ocularcentric crux for an arrival at rethinking/rewriting/re-feeling/(re)moving the (matrix of) self. It is important to note that transparency (e.g., unprotected data and free-online labor through internet participation and clicks) and individualization (e.g., capitalist-colonial erasure of the significance of collectivities/socialities/welfare) paradigms influence arguably delusional singularizations and self-isolations of a (psychosomatic) matrix/reality. Phased from this difficulty are questions about live(d), perceivable, or collectively-experienced body-borders, and how such pillars of isolated selfhood can be problematized in performative (corporeal and intellectual) inquiry. This is also to articulate that an emergent, apocalyptically neoliberal body-normativity fails to preclude questions around the interconnected and interrelational functions of identification, personhood, and selfhood. Experienced by the bodies projected from the self as both flesh and pixel, post-internet transindividuality presupposes (some of) these functions.
Proposed is a thought-experiment (or case-study-experiment) which considers the intersection of Generation Z and Millennials, a timeframe (approx. 1990-1997) in which folks born with access to the internet would/could/might effectively grow up, accumulate muscle/bone mass and psychic relations as the World Wide Web itself transformed from a more horizontal, unhinged, public matrix towards the platform for monopolized (Google, Meta, Amazon) control over most mainstream online traffic data and social interaction. Thus, young individuals amassing selves at this generational interchange experience(d) technologically-textured matrices of “bio” development. Puberty, normalized as the hormonal transduction towards reproduction capacity, finds a compromise with the internet-space, in which some young selves in the ‘90s (e.g.) practiced reproduction (of image, text, game, avatar, as well as masturbation-cum-computer). In order to research and communicate a working understanding of spacetime for transindividual matrices of a “contemporary” or virtual order and in this essay-context, puberty is articulated as both pre- and post-internet, “post-internet” articulating a temporal/generational marker as well as a reference to art, aesthetics, and thought which move beyond the pure novelty of internet domain/space, implementing its tools towards multiple/misc. subjects. Addressed is a post-internet-body (and performer) which moves through the world having experienced a deeply intertwined (pubescent) relation with internet-mediated forms and images of the/self’s body. The body is thus a post-internet entity with internet-bodies/forms contained and archived in psyche-, flesh-, and data-domains.
With the internet operating as a historical phenomenon which no longer arrives exclusively after the “development” of the human-body (again, namely the hormonal bio-technologies that make possible normative reproduction), it is possible to ask about the emergence of the post-pubescent body from which puberty and internet can dialectically interchange. Ultimately, from this, a hypothesis emerges for a post-neoliberal therapeutics of cyber-/embodied-communication in the form of an artistic and choreographic research made explicit/visualized/shared here through moving image (3M0T1NG). At stake are pedagogical/epistemological/practical/philosophical interstices for the demonstration, reception, production, and experience of (artistic) research and performance. Beginning in a cyber-grounding, an excerpt (below) from Psychoanalysis in the Technoculture Era (2013, Alessandra Lemma & Luigi Caparrotta) introduces cyberspace, simultaneously a proposition for the contextualization or launchpad of post-internet bodying. Spliced by personal interjections in braces and italics, the enumeration below arrives/opens a matrix perhaps called elaborated or distilled – at least in intellect and understanding, if not in experience or sensation. Detail and specificity here therefore may promise a crisper portal through which to ask and/or answer more metaphorical, playful/poetic/philosophical, and performative-practice questions around transindividual equations for choreographic/psycho-therapeutics.
Situating observations made in her clinical psychoanalytic praxis, Lemma’s informative introduction to (psycho-)cyberspace, neatly/adjacently fitted into an analysis of two adolescent patients, helps orient towards asking the following critical/core questions of this (performance) research: what is the experience of space (or spatiality as such) for the post-internet (aka post-pubescent) body? (And thus, how has the body, as a relational object, transformed here, psychically and otherwise?) Which demonstration (as opposed to definition) of choreography invokes a post-internet spatiality with integrally social nodes? (Metaphorically, how can the virtual dance and intercommunication of cyberspace entities and selves be rendered, exported, and translated to a spacetime of, for example, the theater/gallery?) If psychoanalysis aims at treatment via intersecting conscious and unconscious fears, conflicts, and experiences, what is the psycho-/analytic articulation of the complex states and feelings of being that emerge in post-internet choreographies? And, in reflection/analysis, how are these affect-byproducts both embodied thoughts and feelings as well as corporeal semiotics (rich/ripe with undefined power and vocabulary) of cyberspace?
In 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} (“emoting/networking”), the [my] choreographic/artistic research of Zander Porter [me] at DAS Choreography – Amsterdam University of the Arts, ze [I] speculate[s] how starting from the simulation of eye-contact, the dancing, mirroring face renders complex images, disconnecting from “true” feelings/expressions. Practicing the manipulation of the face and feelings through sustained eye-contact points towards a transindividual state of presence and time, of not knowing what is being embodied, of dissociating from normative emotionality and manifesting, queering inter-relational languages anew in “real” and virtual time. Since 2019, Zander [I] has[/have] crafted “emoting exercises” to build upon research questions around the introduced topics post-internet (dis)embodiment, (dis)individuality/subjectivity, and technologized eyes. Past choreographic works, developed in important instances via intimate duets, have incorporated these exercises to research and choreograph new characters, gamified movement landscapes, and forms of staged togetherness/onlineness. 3M0T1NG works to upgrade and score a complicated matrix of “emoting exercises” – for a group of two, four, six, or eight (parallel, rectangular, hexagonal, octagonal ceremonies). New forms/modulations/computations of partnership emerge as well as metastable shapes/edges and transitional, micromovement duets between emoting partners. In practice and performance, a choreography of communication emerges from symbols, gestures, faces, feelings, gazes, attitudes, characters, and representations whose wonkily-mirrored souping-together proposes a context for unimaginable/unknown vocabularies of exchange, communication, empathy, and therapy to emerge for the performers, their selves, the collective, its held/spliced/concatenated selves (from “different” individuals), as well as invited guests/audiences. This plural and interweaving matrix of somatic and psychic relations asks about how to proceed here in writing: which terminology or psychosomatic discourse can tap into or unveil an abundance/overwhelm of images and faces explored by 3M0T1NG scores and matrices?
The choreographic meditation towards an emoting, frenzied container for transindividual equations may, perhaps, in all its intensity/compounding/density, flatten/nullify the intensities of felt/exchanged images and feelings, yielding a schizoid affect-atmosphere. Pathologically, the schizoid personality type is characterized by emotional aloofness and solitary habits. A consideration is made otherwise for the psycho-therapeutic potentiality of schizoid arrangements and performances of mirrored/empathized affects/states in social choreography. This occurs in question through a collective embrace of “too-many” affected objects and exchanges, a particular sort of overstimulation not thrown to the wind but collectively held and contained in careful scores and attention. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020), Erin Manning describes the “schizoid pole” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972):
The schizophrenic process, or what they call the schizoid pole, refers to the manner in which desire invests itself in sociality. At the schizoid pole, knowledge schizophrenizes, passing beyond its own axiomatics, creating new operations. […] Multiplicity in differential, the schizoid pole explodes the great tepid aquariums of our psychological imaginations. Beyond pathology, there are no criteria. (Manning 2020, 289–291)
Related to the prefix “schizo-” (divided/split), schizoid offers a textural and nuanced prefiguration for the relational-affecting multiplicities of 3M0T1NG which likewise desire towards/beyond pathologized therapy. Recapitulating the pathologizing of madness, schizophrenia, chaos, or aloofness is the anti-aim; instead sought and imagined are such “new operations” (e.g., transindividual equations) for the self-cum-device (post-internet, cyborg) entity as well as the matrix-entity (bodies) of the choreographic-social. Reiterated: the etymological specification of “division” in “schizo-” triggers a mathematical language of 3M0T1NG towards a function (plural exploration) of the (trans)individual-social in the proposed choreographic matrices of the practice and performance inquiry. Through psychic, physical, and emotive dimensions of mirroring/emoting practices, multiplicity and division are experienced via dissociation (from known/familiar reactions and expressions), disembodiment (via “relocating” possessed eyes and kinesthesia via/through/between eyes of other flesh and devices), and psychosomatic skepticism (through questioning, resisting, and remixing intuitive modes of seeing/sensing self/other, exposing/expressing an emotion or face, or gesturing/adjusting segments of the moving body, particularly the hands). This is a form of “deliberately scrambl[ing] the codes” (15) from Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the schizoid pole in Anti-Oedipus. In its refusal of policed, regulated, and normalized psychological functionality and sociality, this code-scrambling carries forth anti-capitalist (post-neoliberal) ideology/worlding.
Imagined in this research as a sibling of the schizoid, the disembodied is introduced as a state of recognizing the possessed or felt body as somehow disconnected or altogether separate from the self (or: the flesh-body, or the first-person [e.g., gaming] perspective). The schizoid and the disembodied share an affinity for detachment, scramble, dissociation, and forms of privacy, somewhat regardless of the body and a subjective reality’s proximity to other bodies and matrices. Proximity also thus reveals its own illusiveness. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless, Erin Manning delineates relational affect-states as “Practicing the Schizz,” where schizoanalysis (against psychoanalysis) asks which modality of relationality is produced in the psychiatric/psychosomatic encounter. Schizoanalysis asks: “What kinds of conditions facilitate a shift in how subjectivity is produced, and what kinds of practices can be invented to support and sustain it? […] Practicing the schizz involves developing techniques for the creation of machinic propositions that orient the appetites activated by the production of collective bodying” (Manning 2020, 156–157). Proposed by 3M0T1NG are some of these facilitated conditions. How can choreographic matrices for relational bodying and emoting precisely/cosmically yield this “shift” invoked by Manning? In practicing and rehearsing a queer-urgent desire for this shift, strategies for provoking and compromising subjectivity and individuality emerge through intertwining the schizoid and the disembodied. Schizoid, or unhinged, relations to ways of psychically contacting other bodies are unlocked through hallucinatory, collective eye-contact and facial (off-)mirroring. Rehearsed transference, copies, and retransmissions of supposedly subjective face- or body-states give way for known, “normative/healthy” expression vocabularies to mutate and detach from corporeal familiarity. Conceptually imagined are their detachments from the body: re-placements of their mythically individualized origins for altered, schizo-psychic spacetime. 3M0T1NG dancing asks how new somatic-social syncs, affect categorizations, and ultimately sensations can be birthed (reproduced) from forms of psychic and corporeal detachment from familiar correlations between (in the score-based plane) image, expression, vocabulary, gesture, and (in the therapeutic plane) self, (trans)individuality, subjectivity/subjection, and collectivity/groupthink. To borrow Manning’s term, 3M0T1NG schizzes, is schizzing, will/must schizz.
The schizzing post-internet body recalls personal/possessed corporeality in relation to literally disembodied entities floating, hollowing, and tracking onscreen. This is a modality for rethinking self/subjectivity in relation to the network of the supposedly single entity that is the one body. This can also be articulated as a virtualized version of body without organs (BwO) – a literal shell, a hollow mesh of pixels enclosing “empty” digital space/corpus around a very thin layer of pixels placed in three-dimensional engine-space. This three-dimensionality encloses an “empty,” non-organs interior to the (e.g.) avatar/character, an interior which actually is seamlessly spatial with the “outside,” as though “oxygen” were flowing crisply between pores of the avatar mesh. In game engines, it’s quite easy and mundane to maneuver the camera to phase through “skin” (mesh) and sit/see momentarily “inside” the empty shell of a self/avatar/character. The only prevention for this for “users” or gamers/interactions is a coded physics script which most often fixes the camera at a certain distance-spectrum from the avatar/character. This digital (non-)body/self without organs/interiority recalls the term BwO, which sees little agreement between scholars of Deleuze and Guattari who expanded ambiguously on the idea in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/1980). They theorized the BwO as an unregulated body potential without imposed organization structures/hierarchies – sourced from thinking with fantasies of psychosis and schizophrenia. Desired here for notation is a sync between the queering of psychic/organic interiority in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-BwO and the post-internet subjective-BwO entity dancing/moving/feeling in 3M0T1NG. The choreographic research wants to understand a “BwE” – a kind of “body without emotions,” whose algorithmically/socially taxonomized emotions (and/as expressions, images, faces, affects, brainwaves) are re-/un-hierarchized, “flattened,” or disembodied and “remixed” in a social matrix which exists at the intersection of performance, rehearsal, event, and ceremony. Transindividual, “BwE” equations for 3M0T1NG emerge alongside terminology like BwO.
As introduced, the post-internet body arguably always recalls its formation (or pubescence) as a period of schizoid disembodiment, a processual replacement of organic interiority with pixelated enmeshment and hollow, virtual shapes. “Schizzing” the orientation towards the post-internet body (without organs) is an invitation for a non-pathologizing therapeutics for the body-subject(s) in question and for affect-states which surround it/them – a collective “BwE” bodying (re-invoking Manning’s “collective bodying”). Paradigmatic matrices of “therapy” expand beyond conventional frames in consideration of the transindividual articulation of the body. In her essay “In States of Transindividuality” (2016), Bojana Cvejić claims that transindividuality “happens in the situation in which the individual suspends the function of its (interindividual) relations to the others, or, in other words, disindividualizes itself by putting itself into question, by forcing itself to become aware of what in itself is more-than-individual” (Cvejić 6). Additionally, in her book with Ana Vujanović, Toward a Transindividual Self (2022), the two introduce a sociopolitical and aesthetic-performative transindividuality which “possibilizes” change through unblocking notions of the social in advanced capitalist individualism. Here, transindividuality banks on a politically-articulated disindividualization as a cognizant activation of the multiplicity of the self, the more-than-oneness of the singledom of the individual in/of analytic question. Held in memory and socially-represented reality is the subjective (hyper)individual. Which “suspensions” of the individual’s self-possessiveness are possible in front of another body or bodies – articulated as collectivities morphing between contexts of dance-event or schizzed grouping? Erin Manning clarifies that the “transindividual precedes and cuts through any notion of the individual (see Simondon 1989). Unlike those accounts that begin with the individual to add from there, building collectives from the sum of individuals, the transindividual works transversally” (Manning 2020, 161). A “process,” she clarifies, is “phasing transindividuality” – with the individual its “apex.” This apex is socio-historically questioned and analyzed by Cvejić and Vujanović through the dramaturgical-social and West-East (European) political histories/imaginaries, while Manning reminds that there is no individual which precedes the transindividual. What 3M0T1NG seeks in experiment is a negotiation between these considerations: relational/performative/choreographic scores as transindividual equations for de-emphasizing the neoliberal individual – while also exploring subjective apexes of person(ality), character, and representation, and mirages of the production of the individual. This tension between subjectivity and transindividual carries forth embodied paradoxes performed by the research.
The transindividual in internet pubescence composes selfhood as a scattered, undemocratic assemblage of dying, discarded, rebirthed, invented, and appropriated avatar humanoids, screennames, and playable characters. Affect and communication as such, when mapped to a body which maps to this kind of transindividual articulation, ask about what kind(s) of individuation (as opposed to individualization) influence the bodies-selves in question. In her Always More Than One (2012), Erin Manning emphasizes that individuation happens through what Gilbert Simondon calls dephasing, which spurs transformations regarded as transductions. Post-internet individuation thus perhaps overlaps phasings (as neither dead nor alive virtualized selves) in a nonlinear spacetime of the World Wide Web matrix superimposing itself above/with/through/below global-networked matter. (This superimposition can be imag[in]ed as either metaphysical, à la invisibility of dark matter, or as the entire matrix-network of technological hardware interlocution.) Manning writes:
Dephasings, seen from the point of view of the transduction they call forth, are at once how force takes form and how the rift in the continuity of an ongoing process is felt. Dephasing is about the activity of phases commingling to the degree that they generate a turning point that resolves, momentarily, into this or that singular event or discrete occasion of experience—a remarkable point that shifts how an occasion continues to become. (Manning 2012, 74)
The idea of this turning point, articulated as a resolution towards singular events and occasions, resonates with those demarcated, hollow-shaped selves in webspace, in the thinness of the bytes that compose sometimes prevailing and sometimes lost-forever databases for online profiles and identities. These selves arrive thanks to the dephasings that coproduce their emergence: the forces concocted via the affects, relations, and experiences that trigger a body towards its virtualization. The transduction(s) that result(s) is-are perhaps the study at hand.
Through meditating on Always More Than One, a queered mathematics emerges and renders a crisis for conventional matrices and computations, which in turn very much informs scores for space and time in choreographic and performative experimentation. When “one” as the archetypal individual quantity demarcation is also one as in “1” in binary code, what can it mean to be more than one/”1”? Can one also be “0” or must one be regarded merely conceptually as “beyond” (aka “more than”) one? When one is beyond oneness, it is imaginable also to be zero, or nothing, or “0,” or one-and-a-half, or pseudo-infinitely intersecting matrices for all living, nonliving, anti-, and dark matter. 3M0T1NG inspires imaginations of these numbering alternatives in relation to altering parallel and perpendicular interfaces, adjusting (improvising, challenging) rhythms and metric scoring, and exploring symphonic combinatorics via relational-communicative desires (remixing imitation, innovation, and rejection between zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, or eight performer/body-possibilities). The multiplicity of answers/orientations queers relationality in the capitalist-neoliberal matrix-construct, whereby individuation might not always be regarded as a crisis of self-as-oneness-actualization.
How does the more-than-oneness of the post-internet body generate transductions in a relational matrix/network – and which languages or framings suitably-enough describe and resonate with the spacetime that holds these transductions? Post-internet-commingling bodies necessarily individuate in proximity (and almost always in contact) with network devices, namely smartphones, laptops, and surveillance/aerial/biometric cameras/data. (No coincidence lies here in this coexistence/codependence. The main questions thus regard the spectrum of post-internet embodiment across generations which survive the development of the World Wide Web.) On the body, this individuation collapses the flesh and the aluminum alloy, the eyeballs and the sapphire glass lens, the face and the silicon, the intestines/heart/arteries/genitalia and the gold/silver/copper/tungsten. Intercommunicative matrices not only rely on but are structured via the sub-matrices that intertwine flesh and device. In 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng}, each body possesses/dons a smartphone on a unique exterior surface of the body (forehead, occiput, hip, sacrum, sternum, thoracic back), networked via a local router and whose sapphire eyes-visions are mediated/selected/edited and projected onto theater/studio/gallery walls via dramaturgical assignments for a live-technician. This clarifies the dance between the terms in the research title (“emoting” and “networking”), proffering also a proposal for the transindividual tethers of the cyborg (a sweet/retro term invoked now as the contemporary human-smartphone pairing). In her Updating to Remain the Same (2016), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun marks apparent the unique and relational world of the network cards that function as the intercommunicative souls of human-bodies’ “possessed” devices. She describes:
At a very basic level, our networks work by ‘leaking.’ A wireless network card reads in all the packets in its range and then deletes those not directly addressed to it. These acts of reading and erasure are hidden from the user, unless she executes a UNIX tcpdump command or uses a packet sniffer in promiscuous mode so that her network card writes forward these packets to the computer’s central processing unit (CPU). […] The technical term ‘promiscuous mode,’ however, is a misnomer: whether or not you make your network card promiscuous, it acts promiscuously. A network card only appears faithful to its user because it discreetly erases—that is, does not write forward—its indiscretions. […] Our devices, our computers, constantly leak. […] It is important to remember that, although networks are imaged as graphs, they are analyzed numerically as matrices. (Hui Kyong Chun 51–52)
The transductions of interest are the ones that might perform similarly to Chun’s “UNIX tcpdump,” a command line utility that allows one to capture and analyze network traffic moving through a system, often used to help troubleshoot “network issues.” Rather than necessarily becoming the computer-coding or hacking algorithms-master (and thus embodying the self even deeper as-above-below data), how might the body transduce relationally such that the (dis)embodiment and intercommunicative/telepathic functions of social matrices make apparent/ceremonious/transindividual the post-internet spawning/fraternizing of (our/these/those) network cards? Reworded: as a research alternative to computer science, which social choreographies for bodies illuminate the sociality of (“our”) networked devices? How can possession over selves and devices come undone or reimagined through performance? 3M0T1NG performs these questions with epistemological openness, without concluding or imagining solutions/conclusions.
The above and following questions also simmer and segue between the first (lengthier) and second (shorter) sections of this essay. In addition, with regards to choreographic scores and performance strategies, which matrix-functions permit/prosper the dephasings of post-internet selves yielding a post-/altered-individuation (transduction) towards the post-neoliberal transindividual? This might also leak-ask: in which ways can selves deluded by hyper-individuality move, emote/feel, and relate such that different versions of selfhood (dephasings) spur a transformation (transduction) that invites selves/bodies towards (trans)individual, processual states/presences? And how might these states, when considered within the dialectical proposal of post-internet/disembodied (schizoid), suggest (schizoid) therapeutics for neoliberalization-selfhood/individual(ity)?
As artistic research, 3M0T1NG scores two supposedly distinct dramaturgies/choreographies: one for bodies-cum-eyes and one for devices-cum-lenses (sapphire). The research presents and rehearses itself for itself (including its technological/theatrical architecture) and for intermittent audiences, inviting the intersected collectivities of personal selves/bodies and personal devices (of both “performing” and “non-performing” participant-groups) to intermingle and unbecome through emoting exercises – exploring psychic dissociations with familiar emotive-somatic landscapes through increasingly fractured, fractal, and asymmetrical mirroring of other bodies/selves. Through rearticulation and practice, a mythos and chimerical semiotics of the networked device infects and affects the socially configuring matrices of relational emoting/expressing/moving. This infection/update/effect/affectation reminisces of transhumanist discourses around the technological “advancement” (or devolution, mutation, annihilation, transcendence, etc.) of corpo-reality. Explored here, alongside moral/ethical meditations about the anthropogenic/apocalyptic unfolding/destiny of the “human” amidst colonial-capitalist-extractivist “technological advancement,” is this mythos and semiotic capacity for networked devices to clarify and texture more complicated corpo-cyborg-reality, for folks as performers/spectators/workshop-participants and possibly also readers/thinkers/“publics”/movers. Nothing “better” or more cosmically-clearly illustrates such than the relational, nonverbal spirit of the performance/event/rehearsal/ceremony itself.
In 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng}, the “UNIX tcpdump” command conjured by Hui Kyong Chun is a type of technogenetic hack caricatured and taken up by the performance’s live technician. The ability to work with software (Resolume) which collects, grids, and displays output options for networked device lenses paints an artistic and improvisatory stroke into and around the conventional dimensions and interfaces of smartphones and their lenses. This increases/warps the dimensionality of spacetime (in question) which is inherently technologized.
Technogenesis rewrites conventional ontologies within relational matrices of selves/bodies towards a contemporary transindividuality that clarifies the post-internet inflexion of the threads in writing here. In her Relationscapes (2009), Erin Manning describes technogenesis as “ontogenesis of the bio-technological not as a technical additive to the biological but as an emphasis on originary technicity. […] Technogenesis defines bodies as nodes of potential that qualitatively alter the interrelations of the rhizomatic networks of space-time in which they are ephemerally housed” (Manning 2009, 66). These rhizome-networks sense in-movement bodies, open systems that reach-toward becoming through relational matrices. “To make sense technogenetically, the couple dance/new technology must ask how a technology can make relation felt” (73). Technogenetic transduction comes into view as a function-umbrella for networked-and-bodied matrices. How can the protagonist narrative of devices invite new understandings for relationality? With which rescripting/articulations can devices move beyond prosthesis towards participation in “pure plastic rhythm” (66)? Through challenging the ontological dominance of human over technological, technogenesis opens a dephasing of transparency-opacity binary mandated by neoliberalism and upheld by social surveillance mutated by personal information interfaces and application usage. This challenge, which permits the mythos/spirit of the device to ask its own questions unto corporeality, struggles at the boringly hard edges of Meta (Facebook) and Google, whose data/profile-monopolization/extraction corporate protocols feed-profit off of the exacerbated willingness of its “users”/subjects to spill and leak their bodies and labor in societal contexts which excessively regulate transparent articulations and images of the self, body, connection, interest, career, sex, affect, and biography, etc.
Transparency, the veil of paradoxical non-veiled thinness, has emerged as a primary function of the neoliberalized internet. This transparency has become mandated by a panoptic gaze totally enmeshed by the era of internet-/networked proliferation. In The Transparency Society (2012), Byung-Chul Han emphasizes that transparency is “hostile to pleasure” and “annihilates room for play [Spiel-Räume]” (Han 30). This room for play describes a pure plastic rhythm (Manning) articulated or made possible by technogenetic transduction. Transparency implies that eyes and sapphire lenses really see, objectively; it suggests a kind of gamified capture of and ultimately absorption/consumption of others’ selves into an isolated oneness of individualizing individuation. To make space for forms of technogenetic play, transparency must be mistrusted.
The panopticon as such is also poetically prolapsed/historicized alongside hormonal transduction in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008). Following the logics of the “pharmacopornographic era,” demarcating the panoptic operations of pharmaceutical and pornographic companies onto relational and sensing/sexualizing bodies, how can Preciado’s deployment of testosterone towards undoing embodied, neoliberal commodification be extended towards other “substances” and technologies? A few which become namable and also relevant for articulations of technogenetic play, schizoid disembodied, and (queering-)spacetime include: ketamine (an anesthetic for disembodiment and technogenetic spatiality and distancing), dopamine (a neurotransmitter correlating to pseudo-pleasures experienced through and beyond digital/virtual connectedness, information access/download, and application usage), and adrenaline (a hormonal reality of social, physical, or virtual heightened-play-presence or pure plastic rhythm). Although 3M0T1NG does not condone/disperse/theatricalize/tokenize such substances, it does draw inspiration from contexts which intensify their technogenetic potential, e.g., amusement parks (roller coasters), Berghain (nightclub), TikTok/Instagram reel (short video) binges, and others. These sites as examples offer offline/online portals for remixing scripts of engagement with hormonal selves and ultimately serve as memory-experiences/selves for inclusion in 3M0T1NG collectivities and playtime/playscape. The improvisatory invitation of 3M0T1NG asks its bodies/performers to reveal, expose, and co-witness/enter conjured technogeneses through downloading the hormonal, affective, and ultimately playful textures of special/spatial/relational memories. These “special” memories are drawn upon and selected for their specificity and connection to technogenetic potentiality, thus clarifying the brief (exemplary) invocation here of some forms of hormonal technogenesis coinciding with the more lengthily discussed iteration of the smartphone-object.
In an all-seeing society and sociality, in which sight is more clarified by data and image capture than bio/eye/soma capture, 3M0T1NG gestures towards a therapeutic technogenesis as a protest, meditation, ritual, groupthink, (clothed) orgy, and live-networking-event through inviting and exacerbating/emphasizing/upsizing the potency, power, scale, and vision of personal “devices” – where the device intentionally crystallizes the image of the smartphone while also referencing the device of (trans)individual selves-in-exchange. Rather than downsizing, retreating, or “turning everything off” to “unlink” or “take a break” from neoliberal abundance of surveillance protocol and information/consumption, 3M0T1NG asks how such modes of reconfigured attention, mentality, corporeality, and sociality can be felt and shared through a hyper-dimensional panopticon of techno-spacetime, activating equations for transindividual release, exposure, vulnerability, cooperation, refusal, disgust, amazement, ecstasy, and horror through/within/between/inside each other: each other’s body as flesh-cum-device entity. “The society of [transparency and] intimacy is a psychologized, deritualized society. It is a society of confession, laying-bare, and the pornographic lack of distance” (Han 30). Relevantly, Han alludes here to the paradox between image proximity/detail/resolution and the extreme alienation promoted by hyper-networked individualities. 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} proposes/queers/invents/strategizes for sensations, psychologies, and rituals for this precise paradox to be danced and reinterpreted by bodies-devices transducing between the sensual, social, visual, and psychic valences of (them/their)selves and each other.
{{ video-documentation: 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng}: https://vimeo.com/816467522/7ea674bb9f }}
**(fourth phase/performance in its
four-phase evolution; find phase two at the beginning of the
text)
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Zander Porter is a Californian artist based in Berlin. Working between liveness and onlineness, ze interpolates (dis)identification and (dis)embodiment between surface, portal, psyche, and corpus. Zander’s practices negotiate attention, gender, affect, subjectivity, and role play through an approach to internet semiotics, hormonal technologies, and surveillance paradigms with a mixture of curiosity, reverence, and skepticism. Byproducts (performances) of this negotiation are articulated as (technogenetic) matrices of queerer relationality. Ze has been a core member of XenoEntities Network (XEN), a platform for discussion and experimentation focusing on intersections of queer, gender, and feminist studies with digital technologies. Holding a BA in Art Studio (with additional coursework in Computer Science and Performance Studies) from Wesleyan University and an MA in Choreography from DAS Graduate School – Amsterdam University of the Arts, Zander has worked or participated in residencies at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York, Cité internationale des arts, Trauma Bar und Kino, ACUD MACHT NEU, the Saison Foundation, and National Institute for Space Research (INPE), among others.
© 2023 Zander Porter
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