BODY DATA LOOP 我記得住機器記住我記住的
BODY-DATA-LOOP is a live performance and installation resulting from 3 years of artistic exchanges between choreographic and technology artists in Australia and Taiwan. The project is working to interrogate the value of collaboration across these disciplines, and to deepen the discourse while expanding the canon – of a third distinct artistic discipline.
This collaboration stems from the “2022 – 2024 Taiwan and Australia Choreography and Technology Exchange Program,” a three-year initiative jointly organised by the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), Critical Path in Sydney, Australia, and the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney. During the program, Taiwanese and Australian artists participated in overseas visits and residency exchanges, gradually developing their work concepts. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) joined in the role of concept realisation and exhibition production, co-producing the works developed in this phase with C-LAB and Critical Path. The artists engaged in mutual exploration through the unique performance and exhibition spaces at NTMoFA, shaping and refining their concepts. After multiple site visits, they experienced the physical and auditory characteristics of the 11-108 SPACE experimenting with the use of digital and choreographic materials, to present this inspiring collaboration.
Image of program notes:
This show is the culmination of many years of artist exchange partnership between Critical Path Sydney and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab – 臺灣當代文化實驗場 Taipei. As well as the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney, Australia under the name “2022-2024 Taiwan and Australia Choreography and Technology Exchange Program.“
BODY DATA LOOP 我記得住機器記住我記住的
Data leaves our bodies and returns as memory.
This venue is a loop,
A machine that remembers the data of 4 human bodies.
Bodies of data that are now discorporate.
An Incantation invokes the machine to remember..
The machine only remembers data. It cannot remember the bodies.
If your memories left your body and entered the machine, would you still remember them directly?
Or would you remember only what the machine remembers?
How can technology dissolve the hard boundaries between one another? Communication technologies promise to collanse the time and space that separates us by defeating the tyranny of distance, only to reveal that our ability to dissolve the barriers between one-another ultimately relies upon our cultural technologies…The magic of digital technology arrives when it does bolster our cultural technologies.
A proposal then to the audience— this is not a technological space—it is a venue tor dissolving the hard boundaries of ourselves. Do you feel connected or displaced?
How much repetition is required for the uncanny to become normal? When 4 bodies continue into the future as a single body, regardless of their substrate, do we have the cultural technologies to make this harmonious?
See images at our Instagram.
The collaborating artists are:
This program is hosted by Critical Path’s resident artist and curator interrogating technology and choreography – M@ aka Matt Cornell – who will continue to work from C-LAB in Taipei alongside C-LAB curators Wu Darken and Cicia Wang, and project manager Cindy Lin 林欣怡, on this multi-year exchange.
The artists will be supported by the mentorship of Yu-Hsin Su and Eisa Jocson, as well as the technical teams of CLAB and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.
More info on the 2024 artists:
Tian Zi-Ping works mainly focus on the reflection towards the technical production and media era, and also attempt to achieve the multi-perspective artwork through the creative process. Tian shifts between roles of audio visual technician, visual designer, and executive producer of new media devices at exhibition and theatre.
Lee Ming-Chieh is an independent choreographer born in 1989 in Taiwan. Her recent artworks are focusing on the phenomenon of “Nomadicity of current generation” that people long for moving and yet search for sense of security in it at the same time. She usually focused on the dynamic of body, objects and things as the main mediums for her research related to memory and time, and further discussed the flowing performativity of body and space.
Roslyn Orlando is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, text and experimental music. She is interested in the ways new technologies produce language, communication and meaning. Her work explores how these networked systems infiltrate, co-opt and disrupt our ontologies, emotional transmissions and experiences of time, memory, death, desire, friendship and other socially formed cognitions.
Nasim Patel is an artist engaging with diasporic identities, technologies and the Anthropocene through rap, digital work, game development, performance, and writing. He has worked with artists such as Jo Lloyd, Matt Cornell, and Chris Chua, with whom he helped develop the interactive video game performance ‘BeatStorm‘. Nasim’s major two recent works ‘non-paradise’, a short film commissioned through the Sydney Opera House’s Shortwave program, and ‘Equivalent Voids’, created as an outcome for The Grimwade Collection Miegunyah Student Project Awards 2023, both explored the universality of desert spaces, parallels between void spaces and digital environments, and the particular experience of the early migrant cameleers in Central Australia. He is currently working with producer Tom Benter on a collaborative debut rap album, titled ‘Freckles on My Ancestor’s Face’
To read about the 3rd year of the exchange program. (2024) please click here.
To read about 2nd year of the exchange program (2023) please click here.
To read about year 1 of the exchange program (2022), please click to download the wrap up (PDF A2) poster for 2022 or email [email protected] to collect a printed poster for your wall.
And click below to read about the specific Labs of 2022.
Physical Futures Digital Exchange Residency
This exchange is digitally hosted on data servers sit atop unceded lands of displaced First Peoples, and the connecting fibre-optic submarine data cable runs through the lands and waters of many displaced First Peoples across what recently became known as East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.
Both The Drill Hall at Critical Path and CLAB’s campus are former military research sites that sit atop the lands of displaced First Peoples and we acknowledge their ongoing connection and custodianship.
Principal on-going project partners:
Presentation partner:
The 2024 premiere has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Critical Path is supported by:
