Connection

Connection arises from the urgency to question the relationship between body and technology. In an era where the boundary between organic and digital is becoming increasingly thin, the performance poses an essential question: are we controlling the machine, or is the machine defining our movements?

The cables, artificial veins of a technological organism, become the physical symbol of this tension. They wrap, constrict, and connect. The performers attempting to free themselves represent the individual's struggle to maintain their autonomy within a system that simultaneously integrates and binds them.

Real-time visual processing closes the circle: human gestures are captured, digested, and returned by the machine in the form of an image. The audience thus witnesses a double layer of reality, the physical one on stage and the digital one of the projection—two dimensions that feed off each other without ever completely coinciding.

The performance opens with the beginning of the sound component produced by Andrea Antonelli. The two performers enter simultaneously, emerging from the darkness of the environment. On stage there are two chairs and a basket of cables and electronic components positioned in the center, between the two stations.

Each performer takes cables from the basket and ties themselves up, wrapping themselves in an inextricable tangle of cables and electronic components.

This physical and sonic performance is digitally processed in real time by a computer, which returns the visual processing through a projection behind the performers on stage.

At the end of the backing track, the performers leave from where they came, stumbling and crawling, still tied by the cables, while the lights go out. The visuals are created in real time with Touchdesigner and Kinect v2.