disarming II performance

disarming II performance continues Emanuel Gollob´s disarming series with a performative improvisational setting involving a dancer and a detached robotic arm. Throughout the 25-minute-long performance, the detached industrial robotic arm ReBel continuously tries to learn how to move forward from the status quo in the human-robot-environment relation based on stereophonic listening and torque feedback. A dancer experienced in contact improvisation is asked to put herself in the situation of the robot and bodily imagine how she would re-learn body and movements new, based only on acoustic & haptic attentiveness. Collaboratively, they shape a hierarchically balanced performance where both largely rely on sound and movement as primary modalities while still bringing in their unique body knowledge. Together, they create a performative improvisational moment, potentially allowing the emergence of relationships in flux – of fluid cognition bodies dynamically spanning and fading across the termed entities.

When living in a world with increasingly complex layers of technology in, around, and with us, we certainly lack a logical understanding of those but perhaps, even more, attentiveness to its performativity, a sensibility to the emergent relations between termed entities, an imagination of how algorithms might conceptualize the world different to us.