Motherboard

Motherboard (Sound Foetus V.2)

In performance news: I am pleased to be working again on a performance piece that I fell in love with almost a year ago. To date, no piece has challenged me in the same addictive way and simultaneously drawn me back towards developing it further. The concept for this interactive, one-on-one performance experience was re-kindled as the submissions for the Tempting Failure Festival 2016 opened, but also as my investment in the genre of performance art has developed and my knowledge for the undeniably present world of cyborgs and automation naturally seeped into my work.

The first version of this project was conceived last year during my MA. The initial stimuli was listening to internal recordings of lambs within the womb, consequentially fueling a scenography project based on the concepts of parenthood, distortion and ultimately, the machine. It questioned the one thing that separates humanity from contemporary robotics; that is, the ability to create life.

Motherboard uses sound and visual art in this intimate experience to invite the spectator to physically interact with a performer that is uncanny, and yet truly "other". It is the space for the insemination and growth of a half-mechanical-half-human  sonographic fetus. Marilyn Maness Mehaffy in Fetal Attractions (2000) defines a sonographic fetus as 'the ultimate cyborg in that it is "created" in a space of virtuality that straddles the conventional boundary between an organic body and a digital text'. Although there is argument that the cyborg is considerably more, it is at this point, betwixt the real and representational where the cyborg exists as the ultimate simulacra. 
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Caught between two overlapping sound worlds, the human and the post-human, the audience are invited into a moving and honest experience, and are left questioning and remembering their impact in the discourse of the performer's the body.

If you've not watched this video yet, watch this, and keep an eye out here for information as I reveal my collaborators for this project.