Electronic Wearables & Circuits (2018–…)

During my art research PhD, I looked at the practice and politics of ‘women’s work’ through a collaboration with Kobakant, a female collective of electronic crafters in Berlin.

We co-created a wearable crochet ‘soundsuit’ as a haptic interface for making sound from bodily interctions with incidental ambient data (gravity, pressure, air currents).

[conductive copper yarn, copper beads and sheet, microprocessors, cabling, glass beads, silk & poly yarn]

Posthuman circuitry designs, 2018

Drawing: Hannah Perner-Wilson

Mind Rave dance & mantra performance for ‘Sex Re-Boot’, 2022

Photo: Matt Favero

Gravity ‘stone’ sensor and conductive copper stand, Berlin, 2021

Photo: Chaong Wen Ting

Theaterhaus Mitte Berlin residency with Kobakant, 2021

Mariam Arid joins the collaboration

Microprocessor woven into suit

Copper swing sensor

Stretch sensor cuffs for Tai Chi

Breathwork with a feather heartbeat ‘sensor’

Electronic textile experiments

Performance to camera (2020)

What is slow? What is fast? What is ‘normal’?

During the COVID 19 pandemic, time altered: people asked when things would go back to ‘normal’?

In the film Watermotor (1978) filmed by Babette Mangolte, dancer Trisha Brown performs at a phrase at normal speed, and then repeats it, but this time in slow motion. In Hypnomotor, I followed the same logic, dancing a phrase inspired by Brown and by my daily practice of Tai Chi. Tai Chi Chuan trains the body to listen to nonhuman energy (chi) and to move in harmony with it.

In Hypnomotor, however, the ‘slow motion’ section is the actual speed of the dance, while the first part is sped up in post-production to attempt to discover what ‘normal’ human speed is.

two-channel moving image / 25:36 (2023)

Spanda is a principle of cosmic vibration in the Indian Saiva Tantra tradition.

This two-channel work was inspired by a text written by Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata entitled ‘The Ailing Dancer’, in which he recounts sensorial memories of the natural world, remembered from his childhood. The tempos of each image, enact a choreographic poem about dance in a nonhuman dimension.

The sound composition combines binaural foley recordings of materials with an electronically created binaural beat drone frequency. Binaural sound affects the two hemispheres of the brain to alter the oscillations of brainwaves.

Please wear headphones.

Sui Generis

performance installation (2013 – ongoing)

‘Sui Generis’ is a meditation on form’s appearance and disappearance, gender, sex, species and taxonomy.

The sculptural installation is made of three large circles of fabric hanging from steel hooks. When they are activated by the dancers, an endless sequence of forms melt into each other with a dreamlike logic.

Developed as a dance commission from the Art Centre, Keio University, Tokyo as a response to sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s architecture.The work has been danced as a solo and trio in Bulgaria, Germany, Japan, and the UK, most recently at Colet House, London in 2023.

[nylon, lycra, steel hooks, bodies]

Durational dance & Free Time contract, 2018

The following steps indicate the daily development of the practice of Liquidity.

1. Everyday at any chosen time I will stop all activity. I will start from standing in Wu Chi position of Qi Gong. I will visualize the space surrounding my body as slowly becoming filled with liquid. Based on this visualization, I will allow any changes to my physical and psychic consciousness to emerge.

I will allow my body to respond to this visualization as exploring ‘becoming dance’, and from this I will seek to develop this term experientially.

2. I will document this process daily in various ways, which may include writing, drawing, etc. Liquidity must be documented in some manner,every day.

3. Liquidity can take place anywhere, in a public or a private space. It must last at least five minutes but it can last longer.

4. The terms of this procedure may change over time in terms of place, time, participation, and other aspects of the practice.

Liquidity began on 1 January 2018 and has no current end point in view, though it is planned to last the course of my PhD studies at Goldsmiths University.

I invented this practice as a dance methodology for exploring notions of ‘free time’ under neo-liberal research conditions. I used commercial wearables, including the MUSE EEG meditation headband to see how they might affect one’s sense of time.

Funded by an Invention Creativity and Experience Award, Goldsmiths University of London.