BODY DATA LOOP 我記得住機器記住我記住的
is a live performance and installation work, the result of 3 years of artistic exchange between Australia and Taiwan. It will have a preview performance at DOME 2.0, onsite at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab in Taipei (Nov 15) before its premiere season opens at U108 at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung (Nov 23 and 24). The standalone installation work will continue for the rest of the year following these live performances.
BODY DATA LOOP is a choreography of combined bodies – interpolated into data points and mediated via the context of performance installation. The artists work to dissolve the boundaries between each other using digital and cultural technologies including language and dance, telecommunications and projection, incantation and togetherness. Their live performances leave shadows in the installation artwork – residue of an uncanny movement logic – the result of a Body-Data-Body-Data-Body-Data… LOOP. Through repetition the uncanny becomes normalised, familiar and reassuring, pluralism is now the default. The time before and during and after corporal presence is emptied of value hierarchy. We are now ever-present, our collective memory is outsourced, we are held by the machine – a collapse of time and space and corporeal self.
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.
“We work to dissolve the boundaries of bodies, so we can be pieced back together as one in a shared space. Digital technologies attempt to connect us, entwining our embodied cultural technologies, and immersing us in the space between dimensions.
As the boundaries blur, the loop begins. The body informs technology, the technology re-projects the body, and the body impresses upon the digital anew. Through each iteration, cyber-spillages are lost (to/in) the stream, a fair trade for our newfound togetherness.
Once we are one with the machine, our qualities become transient. We are at the whims of the very digital manipulation which our bodies have kickstarted.
we can exist on the same plane, duplicate, expand, shrink – [something to emphasise what elements of reality we manipulate in the film],
The failings of these technologies cast shadows, absences where the residue of our shared experiences coalesce.
Our voices are echoing reminders of the organic that has become static noise. “
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:
