A collaboration with poet Catherine Chen.
What can the staging of technological automation reveal environmentally or emotionally about our perception of labor?
A Floating Grid is a collaborative hybrid performance between a poet and a pen plotter, exploring the liminal space between the human body and mechanical body as poetic embodiments. It engages the audience’s sensory experience of watching a live text shapeshift from a language-oriented object to a soundscape. Inspired by choreographies of labor, installation as performance, and rituals of repetition, this performance reimagines the pen plotter’s sonic and percussive elements into an improvised, living soundscape.
The plotter is controlled by a small computer and the custom software Repeater that creates a perpetual feedback loop between the pen plotter and a pen digitizer, an output and an input device. As the written text moves back and forth between the physical and digital domains, it degrades with every iteration and gradually loses its meaning.
The performance is accompanied by audio generated live from the visuals and typography using the custom synthesizer GeoSynth, as well as a collection of six generative pen plotter prints, using the poems from the performance.
This project is supported within the CultureHub Residency program.
Video: Ji Hoon Kim and Junseo Ha, courtesy of CultureHub
