BI – Un/Bounded

(Metakhorós/Metakhôra/Metatopia 6.0)

in the Metabody Forum 2019

BI Un/Bounded: Body Intelligence Beyond the Infinite [Metakhorós/Metakhôra/Metatopia 6.0] is a nomadic opera/game/metaformance/architecture in 4 acts and a 5th element that stages the ontological tragedy of reductive ways of bodily and social organisation grounding sex, gender, emotion, desire, race, species or ability organisations in colonialism, capitalism and their recombination in digital hypercontol, and promotes experiential choral practices (as renewal of the ancient Dyonisian chorus) that disalign these formations while unleashing the swarming power of movement for a radical movement freedom and a movement r/evolution or n-volutions. Metakhorós happens in the different instantiations of the Metabody Forum: nomadic events of research-creation, worshops and performances happening during the year in several countries and continents, in spaces like refugee camps, prisons, urban and rural spaces, with indigenous, neurodiverse and queer communities, as well as in art centres, universities and theatres, infiltrating and transforming other spaces, opening them up to indeterminacy.

BI Un/Bounded: Body Intelligence Beyond the Infinite [Metakhorós/Metakhôra/Metatopia 6.0] is a performance-installation that plays with the limits of control and indeterminacy, exposes the paradoxes of digital control and reverses aesthetics of gaming culture to unleash the swarming power of bodily movement as selforganising intelligence. A body attached to an interactive robotic sculpture (amoeba, cocoon, womb, interstice) moves apparently constrained by the sculpture, however the less it tries to control the robotic sculpture, the greater freedom of movement can be found, thus exposing the paradox that “the less you control the greater freedom you have”.

Rooted in 4 billion years of evolution of bacterial swarms our movement has an infinitive capacity of variation that can be unfolded though the sense of propcioception: a journey beyond the infinite that lies inside the body and at the reach of our daily expereience. The system connects the proprioception of a human body, with focus on microtorsions, to an amorphous avatar, both digital and physical, that expresses the swarming complexity of propriocetion, like an amoeba, swarm or neural system. The interactor feels a symbiotic entanglement with the avatar as its own torsions transpose in non-linear ways to the torsions of the avatar inviting to discover always new microtorsions, so that the less s/he controls the more internal freedom of new movements s/he will discover, raising the question of who moves who as he alien torions of the avatar echo back into the interactor’s movements.

The work reflects on evolution as a movement of increasing diversification that occurs when consistency and indeterminacy reach a balance, that has been broken by digital culture’s attempt to excercise an absolute control. In times of AI its time to unleash the power of BI. The subtitle makes a side reference to Kubrick’s journey beyond the Ininifte in 2001: a Space Odyssey, which is also a journey beyond the reductive scope of AI: a journey inside the body, unleashing the power of BI. It also makes refernce to the ancient greek concpet of Ápeiron, the Unbounded, indeterminate or limitless as cosmic principle: a claim for creative indeterminacy as source of life and evolution.

METAKHORÓS/Metakhôra/Metatopia is a nomadic, distributed, multidisplinary creation, reseach, activism, education, anticuratorship and dissemination project that hacks the ontological and perceptual infrastructure of four main kinds of organization of bodies-movements:

  • centralised perception,
  • grids,
  • perspective (pyramids and frames),
  • panopticon (circularity and spheres),
  • autonomous algorithms, (AI, digital surveillance, Big Data, planetary scale computation and the interfaces of digital culture).

METAKHOROS

 

The project relates these movement organizations to systems of oppression based on

  • sex and gender,
  • race and background,
  • species and
  • abledness,

and to the dualisms of

  • man-woman
  • mind-body, (as well as emotion-reason and soul-body)
  • culture-nature,
  • subject-object.

The different formations, oppresion categories and dualisms are entangled and interrelated. Each dominant formation has associated ontohacking techniques, the system thus both revisits the genealogy of the dominant ontologies and provides new experiential realities for a more plastic, open and indeterminate culture.

4 different but interrelated techniques of movement-perception are proposed for not only disaligning those predominant systems, but for generating alternate ecologies for an indeterminate, illegible Common Body that defies capture while conforming sustained ecologies. The 4 techniques are developed as artistic procesess in 4 different but interrelated formats (installation, performance, metaformance, chorus) that involve the audience in their own experiential perceptual modification, exceeding the scope of representation, exhibition and performance, while revisiting the history of media (and their interfaces, architectures, choreographies and rhythms, from painting and photography, architecture, dance and music to media arts).

The project unfolds as meta-opera, metagame, metaexhibition, metatheory and metaformance in 4 Acts, strata, entangled spaces or swarms. Each of them proposes n-figuration techniques (both configurations and defigurations of swarm-like bodily composition) in relation to the 4 dominant alignments, and four types of n-volutions (movement revolutions and evolutions as openings).

These are developed and presented in/as the nomadic Metabody Forum/Khorós, accross countries and borderscapes, in refugee Camps, with indigenous communities, in prisons, with neurodiverse people and sexual minorities, in urban and rural environments, as nomadic Choral practice accross disciplines and spaces, accross creation, theory and political-social action. The Forum/Khorós is part of a decolonization project including symposiums and publications, workshops for choral techniques of ontohacking, productions and presentations of installations-performances. The nomadic Forum itself is the ongoing elaboration of choral techniques and works accross borderscapes, creating disalignments while mobilising and sustaining common bodies, for a movement revolution and evolution (or rather n-volutions), that sets to motion a culture of immobility.

The choral improvisational structure is both a drama and a game in which one may explore the genealogy of dominant modes of bodily organisation and enact different kinds of disalignment.

Metastructure: 4 entangled Strata/Acts/disalignments/n-figurations/n-volutions/metabodies/metatopias composing always differently a fifth element: the choral MetaOpera/Metagame/Metaformance (reversing the platonic motion by which the fifth circular element brings order into al the others):

  1. Un/bounded – Flexinamic Metasculpture – beyond centralised, hierarchical, distant and immobile perceptions (monolith/megalith, Dolmen, Menhir, Cairn, totem, pyramid, altar, tomb, phallus, skyscraper, temple), for decentralised and formless simbiotic ecologies of illegible affects.
    • suspended flexinamic metascultpture moving on its own to which the audience can couple exploring subtle shifts of propriocption, in simbiotic entanglement and n-trainment with the sculpture and its lighting, whose colour, intensity and rhythm infuse and intense field of illegible affects…. exploring the boundaries of control and discontrol and the paradox that the more you control the less freedom you have… inverting the hierarchical and centralised perception at a distance of monuments (since ancient megaliths) this totem is a khôra, a formless matrix for symbiotic entanglement from within.
  2. Amorphogenesis – Installation/performance – beyond the grid (textiles, monoliths, agriculture, cities, pixels, microchips, parallel computing, linear thinking, writing and linear orientations of desire), undoing algorithmic movement, rationalism-abledness, space-orientation-cuantification and the subject-object dualism – for a neurodiverse culture and an autistic perception – with neurodiverse communities.
    • 3d metagaming environment of 3D amorphous meshes and spatialised electronic sound. the meshes conform an continually deforming matrix a space continually emerging from movement, irreducible to geometric categorisation, that awakens the deepest memories in our nervous systems and cells: of molecular swarms, of proteins folding, of cytoskeletons morphing in endless amorphogenesis, an antiplatonic cave without forms that invites to explore the gugolplex of folding potentials of the body as it creates a symbiotic entanglements with the meshes expanding outwards.
  3. Microsexes – Metaformance/performance 1 a 1 – beyond anatomy and perspective (pyramids and frames, pages, cameras, screens, selfies, surveillance), sex and the man-woman dualism, selfie, profiling and hyper(sex)work regimes – por a micro/metasex and post/transgender culture – with (post)queer communities.
    • antiperspectival machine and inverted panopticon, with surveillance cameras on the body and electronically processed voice, in a microsexwork space for metaformance: one to one encounters of performer and audience. On the one hand doing a critical comment on hyper sex, hyperwork and hypersexwork, as ongoign capitalization of any measurable activity in digital culture, and of the historical stigma of explicit sexwork underlying the unreconised implicit sexwork of wemon in the home. On the other infolding an amorphous microsexual body of radical epigenetic mutation.
  4. Disalignment Swarms / Khorós – Choral disalignment intervention – beyond the panopticon (circles, spheres, globes, clocks, emoticons, wheels-circular motion-mechanism-engines, globes-bubbles—foams,) race-colonialism, emoticons-emotions-biometrics, click/clock time and the culture-nature dualism – for a decolonial, illegible affect, plastic rhythm culture – with prisoners, refugees, indigenous communities – the return of the dionysian chorus as sustained pratice of ongoing dinsalignments, ntrainment, nvolution, nfigurations-composition.
    • micromovement techniques in which bodies mobilise their inifnite swarming capacity, in contact with one another and the environments creating a nomadic meta-chorus, an alien, formless, microdancing chorus infiltrating any outdoors or indoors space or architecture with unprecedented temporalities, microsexual mutations of the epigenetic environments, sustained ecologies of plastic perceptions.
  5. METAKHORÓS/METAKHÔRA/METATOPIA/METABODY – beyond AA (Autonomous Algorithm networks, Big Data, PCs, Interfaces, Smartphones, social networks, AI, planetary scale computation systems – grounded on centralised perceptions, grids, perspective and panoticons) species-humanism, the mind-body dualism – for a metahumanist, common proprioceptive body-culture – with meta/poshumanistic and transpecies communities.
    • the multilayered metaformative environment and choral practice bringing together all the above, in different ways in every instantiation, just like alignment and geometries become entangled differently in every situation, in sustained metabodily networks in the instantiations of the metabody FORUM.