Metanoia

I’m drawn to the intimate and erotic relationship between the human body and technology in live performances. Starting in 2022, I began exploring the possibility of playing with microphone-speaker feedback and placing contact microphones within bodily orifices to amplify the sound of muscle movement, footsteps, and bone-conducted sounds. After a series of experiments, I started to sonically augment the body – by placing a customized speaker in my mouth to create feedback with a headset microphone and place a geophone sensor within my anus to amplify my body movements, and using a pair of Chinese bass drum sticks to play my body as a drum. The in-mouth speaker plays back audio samples of gun sounds and is automated to create feedback at specific points in the performance. My mouth filters and mutes the playback samples and creates multiphonics and beatings when singing with the speaker’s feedback tone. The geophone sensor transforms my body into an instrument, incorporating the room into my acoustic body. My position in the performance space, the speaker’s volume, the muscle movements, and the room’s layout all contribute to the sound-producing process and change the tone of the physical feedback system, which happens occasionally. The sound is conducted from the subwoofer on the ground through my body to the microphone. Because of these variables, the resulting sounds become intertwined with my relationship to the room through my choreography, which is improvised live. Thus, the audience in the room becomes physically connected with me through the haptic low frequencies. The resulting solo performance consists of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, self-harm, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony. The audio is an excerpt from my solo performance at E-Flux Bar Laika in NYC on January 31, 2024. – QLL