KINESICS
is the agglomeration of a few different variously inclined strains of research I have lent my attention to over the years.
It began as the epilogue of a short sci-fi story I wrote in January (2023) which saw the emergence of a hazardous, experimental cardiothoracic surgery of dubious efficacy developed clandestinely in response to a global pandemic. This medical procedure (known as C/6J) has the unforeseen emergent trait of allowing the patient agency over their own blood cells– and ultimately the ability to sense, navigate, manipulate and enhance the properties of their arterial system. This ability is known as Kinesis, which later expands into the field of Kinesics.
The germinal concept for the performance was to demonstrate the cultural ramifications of humanity’s assimilation of Kinesics, much as a historical opera would today. The performance saw six performers in total, three builders constructing the 4-metre bamboo scaffold stage enclosure over the course of a week and a half, two dancers, and a musician. The performance began the moment the first bamboo pole was tied to the stage, and ended the moment the dancers and musician broke out of the bamboo enclosure after it was sealed shut around them (effectively caging them in) for the duration of one hour of concerted movement and music improvisation. The improvisation was guided by many hours of conversation about the characteristics and particularities of the world the performance was carved from – discussions about initiatory rites, banishing sequences, chaos magic, qi gong, the Daoist meridian principles, as well as other esoteric and sub-altern knowledge systems.
The musician we worked with, Noah, rigged gyroscopes to his fingers by sewing them into fingerless gloves. As he played the violin, the vector inputs received from the motion capture hardware were fed through a neural net he trained himself to output deep tonal resonances. These sustained tones fluctuate and pulse in real-time according to the velocity, texture and loci of his finger movements through machine learning. This sound component played the role of rendering the internal machinations of both performers’ bodies more transparent to the audience as they were immersed in the introspective practice of Kinesic Forms.
The Kinesics textbook and written publications foreground the live demonstration, for instance, the textbook contains an abridged history of the Practice of Form, which is the Kinesic school of thought demonstrated by the dancers in the aforementioned live performance. The textbook assumes the voice of a far future scholar of the field of Kinesics chronicling– in excessively redundant academic jargon –the cultural impact the eventual society-wide administration of the C/6J medical procedure has upon the world as we know it.
While I was in Hong Kong I shadowed my grandfather at his workplace and had the privilege of sitting in on heart surgery (passing a line around a blood vessel and tying a knot to occlude it). I used this experience as a reference to develop a technical vocabulary for the Kinesics textbook. The concepts of “hemosthesia”, “hematic shifts”, and “schemes” in particular were all deeply informed by what I learned from open heart surgery and adjacent medical research.
