MICROSEXES/MICRODANCES – Metaformance

  • performances, installations and metasculptures
  • metaformances – 1 to 1 experiences
  • street interventions and immersive installation-performances
  • video and photography installations
  • workshops

Microsexes is a metaformance[1] project in which the body perceives itself through surveillance cameras placed on the skin and electronically processed voice. The cameras in close up enact a tactile and amorphous vision that is not grounded on perspective and its parameters of distance, fixity and framing. The microcameras become an antiperspectival machine for a formless and post-anatomical body, exposing the way in which dualistic categorizations of the body and sex have historically relied on perspectival vision. Here instead infinite potential sexes proliferate in the mobile and tactile vision that recomposes multimodal integration and proprioception. A tiny movement in the hand becomes a gigantic alien landscape.

The body should not attempt to hold onto the usual proprioception, rather it should let control go and enter this new scale and relation till it stops knowing what it’s looking at (perhaps its hand, or back, or neck, or genital). The body suspends in this alien intimacy till it reconnects with its proprioception through that indeterminate otherness.

The project has happened as outdoors interventions projected on buildings, as immersive indoors installation, as one to one encounters with the audiences or even in homes, as a sort of private consultation where the performer enacts or mediates the devisualization of the participant’s body, enacting a disalignment from centuries long apparatuses of perceptual reduction. Thus an alien intimacy and sex is generated that renegotiates the boundaries of intelligibility of the body opening them up to indeterminacy.

[1]Metaformance is a neologism proposed by Claudia Giannetti in 1994, to describe the preponderance of the interface in media culture. I use it to describe the ongoing reinvention and opening up of perception towards greater indeterminacy, focusing not on content but on the disalignments from any fixed perceptual frames.

MICROSEXES WORKSHOP MODULE:

Normative sex-gender is an algorithm, a movement and perception algorithm, and we need to hack it. It’s an ontological algorithm that creates an algorithmic reality. The workshop proposes that normative sex and gender are the effect, not of discursive, performative articulations, but of the way in which movement and perception have become articulated in algorithmic patterns over millennia as part of the articulation of slave societies.

The Algoricene is the era of algorithms, first of static algorithms, since ancient Greek geometries and Renaissance perspective, that generate repeatable, calculable relations and ecologies. Now we enter the era of dynamic algorithms in which deviations become capitalised in Big Data systems as our activities are modulated by planetary scale computations systems and autonomous algorithms of Facebook or Google.

Macrosex is the repetitive algorithm of Greek geometry and Renaissance perspective culminating in porn culture. Hypersex is the new dynamic algorithm of capitalisation of any deviant activity in Big Data culture. How to escape such a control?

Microsexes are amorphous indeterminate movements and perceptions which hack this millenia long tradition of algorithmic sex, of framing bodies and calculating movements. Ontohacking is the proposal to generate alternate perceptions and movements for an amorphous, indeterminate, postanatomical body, a metaformance politics beyond the politics of queer performativity in the Big Data Era.

The workshop will involve a particular ontohacking technique:  Surveillance cameras placed on the skin and electronically processed voice, a metaformative perceptual experience in which the body sees/feels itself away from the perspectival framings

Performances, Installations and Metasculptures:

Metaformances: one to one encounters – experiences of perceptual hacking:

Pagender Cyborg – street interventions:

Immersive indoors installations-performances:

Photography and video installations: