The Night Bears's Posts - conectom2024-03-28T21:07:21ZThe Night Bearshttp://conectom.leimay.org/profile/TheNightBearshttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/66458945?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://conectom.leimay.org/profiles/blog/feed?user=1r5ngrolqv6ud&xn_auth=noPERCEPTIONS // Robot Immigrants: My Heart Is a Travelertag:conectom.leimay.org,2013-06-13:5831649:BlogPost:396402013-06-13T17:00:00.000ZThe Night Bearshttp://conectom.leimay.org/profile/TheNightBears
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341074?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341074?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a> <span class="font-size-1">image: <a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">Eden Nova</a> & <a href="http://kemeya.com/" target="_blank">Kemeya Harper</a></span></p>
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<p>On April 27 & 28th, <a href="http://robotimmigrants.com" target="_blank">Robot Immigrants</a> premiered "My Heart Is a Traveler" at…</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341074?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341074?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a><span class="font-size-1">image: <a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">Eden Nova</a> & <a href="http://kemeya.com/" target="_blank">Kemeya Harper</a></span></p>
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<p>On April 27 & 28th, <a href="http://robotimmigrants.com" target="_blank">Robot Immigrants</a> premiered "My Heart Is a Traveler" at <a href="http://7dunham.com/" target="_blank">7 Dunham</a> in Brooklyn. This piece was presented as my collaborative M.F.A. thesis for the <a href="http://www.pima-mfa.info/" target="_blank">Performance & Interactive Media Arts (PIMA)</a> program at Brooklyn College. This is one of the ways that Robot Immigrants described the project:</p>
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<p><strong>This piece explores personal stories of immigration across multiple generations and cultures set against a backdrop of perpetual technological change. By layering translations between an intangible past and an ephemeral future, we are creating multiple bridges and links across borders. What are we working towards? Can we open up a space to include new worlds, new beings, and a new era of co-existence?</strong></p>
<p><br/> <strong>Artists, Cyborgs & Robots: working together to create Collective Consciousness over the Unfathomable Cliff.</strong></p>
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<p>The audience traveled with us throughout the space, as we sought to answer these questions and discover the possibilities of our ambition. What follows is a mashup of my internal perspective as one of the creators of the piece and a travelogue written by a poet who embarked with us on this journey.</p>
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<p>Here is his itinerary listing the sequence of events and the members of the collective by performance:</p>
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<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Leaving Safe Harbor</strong></span> - Tinu Oyelowo, Sophia Remolde, Eva Von Schweinitz</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Searching for Sumi</strong></span> – Sophia Remolde</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Babatunde's Song</strong></span> – Tinu Oyelowo</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>The Filipino Way</strong></span> – Dan Munkus</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Crossing the Bridge/Processing</strong></span> – Sophia Remolde, Tinu Oyelowo, Eva Von Schweinitz, Kristin Arnesen, Jeremy Goren</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Steerage</strong></span> – Sophia Remolde, Eva Von Schweinitz, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>My Heart is a Traveler</strong></span> – Dan Munkus, Tinu Oyelowo, Sophia Remolde</p>
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<p>As we travel through each section, this essay will oscillate between my personal description of what Robot Immigrants created and the poet's subjective perspective of what he experienced. He writes:</p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">Its style is meant to give equal floor time to emotional and aesthetic evaluation by examining myself as a reflection of the works rather than treating the works as a piece of someone else. This seemed important with a show of this nature, both for the installation's performance-focused structure and due to the collective's repeated efforts to distinguish the gallery-goers present as a community, thereby making the <span class="font-size-2">audienc</span>e the canvas by which to judge the efforts.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://robotimmigrants.com/" target="_blank">Robot Immigrants: My Heart Is a Traveler</a></span></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2">words by <a href="http://sophiaremolde.com" target="_blank">Sophia Remolde</a> & <a href="http://www.mikevarley.com" target="_blank">Mike Varley</a>, images by <span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2"><a href="http://cargocollective.com/brainwomb" target="_blank">Keith Jenson / Brainwomb</a>,</span></span> <span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2"><a href="http://kemeya.com/" target="_blank">Kemeya Harper</a>,</span></span></span></span> <span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a>,</span></span> <span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2">& <a href="http://judithsamper.com/" target="_blank">Judith Samper</a></span></span></span><br/></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Leaving Safe Harbor</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341079?profile=original"><img width="527" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341079?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="527"/></a></strong></span></span><span class="font-size-1">: <a href="http://cargocollective.com/brainwomb" target="_blank">Keith Jenson / Brainwomb</a><br/></span></p>
<p align="center"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">The shadows that started our piece are reminiscent of human form. For me, they symbolize a layer of history, of story, of memory—they are both the separation of our selves from our story and figures of those who have come before us. Our deeply personal connections with our ancestry provided the entry points into our subconscious explorations where we would confront our present and journey forward into the future.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341000?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341000?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://kemeya.com/" target="_blank">: Kemeya Harper</a></span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">On arrival to the space, the traveler is asked to declare their intentions in document form, submitting it to an unknown evaluator with a signed promise of truthfulness. It both relieves and recalls each traveler's personal immigrant burden, large or small, bringing it to the front of the mind for the journey to come. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Passing through cataloging throws us back to beginnings. Projected on a screen acts the artist as ferry-woman, a silhouette traced with a roving beam of bluish light. She dips her pole into the waters, dragging it deliberately, propelling further into a chorus of nautical droning, understood instinctually as a tone of long and protracted passage. To reference so primitive a means of travel is to remember that the immigrant story is undoubtedly the story of humanity, not the story of “the other”.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Searching for Sumi</strong></span></strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span class="font-size-2"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341203?profile=original"><img width="527" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341203?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="527"/></a></span></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://cargocollective.com/brainwomb" target="_blank">: Keith Jenson / Brainwomb</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">For many years, I have made a commitment to chronicling my mother’s stories and experience leaving South Korea to come and marry my father in the United States. I recently learned that as a little girl in Korea, she had a dream of becoming an actress. She grew up very poor and would often see the beautiful dresses in store windows and dreamt of wearing them on the stage. Fast forward thirty years later and I, unknowingly, became an actor. When I first admitted to my mother that I was ditching my studies in psychology to become an actor, I was scared to tell her because of her strict life-long insistence that my sister and I “find a nice husband and get a steady job.” As I admitted the great chance that none of this might come to fruition, the unexpected did. She held my hands as I was crying in the Peking Buffet and she told me about her own long lost dreams of becoming an actress herself. It was in this moment that I vowed to find a way to bring my mother’s own colorful stories to the stage.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">It all started with Sumi’s Story. By putting her story on the screen, it gave her a life on the stage and a way for her once-discarded dream to come true. On Saturday April 27<sup>th</sup>, Sumi came to Brooklyn to see my thesis. She almost couldn't come because my father was sick and it is becoming difficult for her to travel. I believe it was after she received our postcard with her image in the center that she resolved to be there. And for that one night, Sumi had her dream. Everyone there wanted to meet her. A stranger even asked her for her autograph! After the performance she worked that room as if she had been ready for it all her life. On the way home Sumi told my sister that when she was little, she thought if she could go up on the roof she could touch the sky. For this one night, my mother was a star.</p>
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<p align="center"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341123?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341123?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">We move further into the space and find our first waypoint – the artist confined to a tub wearing a smock of plastic, illuminated only by the projection of her ancestor relating her life's story over speakers. The layering of faces – projection upon flesh, silhouette upon projection – speaks to the interplay in all progenitor-offspring relations. We all wear the expressions of our forebears, even as we eclipse the world's memory of them.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">The aquatic environment containing the energy of the piece, further reined in by the plastic drapings, decontextualizes the artist as representative of “human.” The emotional component remains but the physical component is hidden, diffused in billowed coverings and fluid movements. Movements obscured, yet always transparent, both in physicality and intention. The inner, human mechanics remain present to the ey<span class="font-size-2">e tha</span>t wishes to focus, and that is a choice every individual is free to make. The artist takes over the narration and a synergy is achieved between the layered physicality and the emotional catharsis of the personal narrative, lending honesty to the feelings of loss and weight to the burdened movements. </span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Babatunde's Song</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341129?profile=original"><img width="520" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341129?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="520"/></a></strong></span><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://cargocollective.com/brainwomb" target="_blank">: Keith Jenson / Brainwomb</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">Dan and Tinu interviewed their parents in a similar documentary style and we used the themes inherent in their experiences to generate the physical life of the piece. As influences, their stories helped us figure out our own relationships to growing up in a multicultural experience where, in various ways, we all experienced some sense of Otherness.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">Babatunde's talking and Tinu's impersonation brought up many issues of translation and the undercurrents that run beneath the surface of appearance. As children of immigrant parents, we are the ones who need to dig deeper in order to unearth the truths that they seldom admit. Survival sometimes requires developing a protective layer. Is the way to get under this to have it transmitted through our own selves?</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">Biomimicry was a hot topic in robotics at this time, as the German engineering company Festo had unveiled its latest creation: <a href="http://planetsave.com/2013/04/18/german-engineers-build-robotic-dragonfly/" target="_blank">the BionicOpter</a>, a bio-mimicking dragonfly robot. Creating robots in biology's likeness, I questioned: how much are we created in our parents' likeness? How close can we get to telling their story for them? Are we simply mimicking them or are we the conduit? Are we simply designed like them and thus able to do really clever impersonations? Or do we carry them with us and could their story come through us?</p>
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<p align="center"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341218?profile=original"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341218?profile=original" width="533"/></a></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2">With limited prompting we move to the room's center. There a modest throne sits, borne up and covered in hundreds of pounds of fresh, rich soil. The artist works, wordlessly and deliberately, to remove this soil with nothing but bare hands, moving it to a pile of seeming deference. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2">In this work the relative watches over, speaking in words familiar to ears but easily lost to cadence, creating less a narrative and more a soundtrack for an action whose scope demands a meditative mindset lest it degrade to frustration, anger or despair.</span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2">And when the artist takes the throne, the transmission begins. The music shifts from instrumental to folk verse as the words are amplified through the daughter of the father. The creation acts as the voice of the creator in every instance, art or family.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;" class="font-size-2">The immigrant narrative is hardest to bear when it reveals the ignorance of the native in power. He was fired for how he spoke the language. He was fired for how he played the music. He was fired for a cadence that was faultless but foreign. He was fired by those who never learned to listen.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>The Filipino Way</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341138?profile=original"><img width="527" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341138?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="527"/></a></strong></span></span><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://cargocollective.com/brainwomb" target="_blank">: Keith Jenson / Brainwomb</a></span></p>
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<p align="center">How do we separate ourselves from our parents' expectations of us? Can we ever really be free from them? And what are our responsibilities to our parents as they age? One condition of the immigrant is sacrifice; one must give up their homeland in order to build a new life, with new opportunities. Even if you go back you can only ever be a Native Tourist, never really a part of any one place. So you work. And you work hard. You do it so that future generations can live better lives. How do we devote our lives back to them and still maintain our own? </p>
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<p align="center">Gloria "dreams in equations." Dan relates to her words and his own emotions as if he were reading them off a customs form. I think sometimes it takes getting further away from something before you can get close to it. Through deconstructing Gloria's story, I feel like we found her song.</p>
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<p align="center"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341140?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341140?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">Subject indicates travel.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Subject indicates travel.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Subject indicates travel, a voice compels,</span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">to a small nook in the gallery's corner, containing the artist in a plastic observation booth, observing his relative and describing the encounter. </span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">Monitor and subject are the terms of the conversation. The emotion of personal narrative is excised in the play-by-play of such impersonal terms. The inherent emotional experience of the immigrant narrative, so present in our journey this far, collapses to create negative space for us, the surrounding observers, to inhabit with our own notions of subject and monitor, age and youth, generation and generation. </span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">In this manner emotion returns to the scene as supplied by the travelers rather than the artist, bypassing the barrier of articulation that inevitably filters artist intention, trusting the community’s emotional understanding.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Then the monitor cuts out and the subject takes over, revealing a pragmatic understanding of the role our descendents play in our lives. Emotion is removed there as well, but in a way that the space is replaced by the speaker with a priority on survival, of all actions based in prudent management of the resources life gives us, flesh included. The emotion is secondary because it is unavoidable. The pragmatic is primary because of its uncertainty</span><span style="color: #003366;">.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Crossing the Bridge/Processing</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341197?profile=original"><img width="504" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341197?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="504"/></a><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://judithsamper.com/" target="_blank">: Judith Samper</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">We wanted to mirror our human customs process at the beginning of the piece with a virtual customs process before entering in the Technological World. We were stumped on how to create avatars of the audience in the space, or otherwise create the illusion that people were being scanned into the computer system. It was difficult to envision a way to do this without it feeling cliché, aesthetically undesirable, or lacking meaning. And then we found a new Max/MSP object called jit.conway that created an interesting visual effect on video. When I researched this object further, I realized that it had some insane metaphorical relevance. The object played John Conway’s <i>Game of Life</i> with the pixels of each image. In short, the number of neighbors that each pixel is surrounded by determines whether it lives, dies, or changes state. It is a model of emergence that allows the computer to self-organize itself into something completely new. That week, I discovered an <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/powers-of-swarms/all/" target="_blank">article in Wired Magazine</a> that created links between consistent swarming behavior across biological beings and how this could be developed in robots. It cited Conway’s <i>Game of Life</i> as one of the earliest breakthroughs in this line of thinking. The implication is that there may be underlying laws that occur across all complex systems, from our neurons to the internet to the very development of the universe itself. Figuring out how individuals work together may be more important than how they work alone. The power of this metaphor is what drove me to continue down this path.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341199?profile=original"><img class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341199?profile=original" width="533"/></a></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #003366;">Around we turn back to the throne room, where a path has been made through the mound of earth to a doorway beyond. At the doorway stands a customs agent ready to further process us. The assembled travelers - given a minimum of prompts - are uncertain of how to proceed, approaching tentatively at first and in individual fashion as though receiving Eucharist. The nature of this passage soon becomes clear, however, and societal training has the group queueing up in short time.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">A device sweeps over our face to scan and capture us. Where before we were asked to recall our immigrant narratives, we are physically anointed as immigrants now. To work the gathered audience into the narrative in this manner is to fully value all our inevitable immigrant narratives, be they more recent in the bloodlines or more distant, identifiable in the communal human experience rather than the personal narrative. It is in embracing this universality that the exhibition achieves its pulse, delivering life to the satellite organs that constitute the show's body – that is, the personal narratives of the artists.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">When we cross that threshold like human steerage, we are shown both dystopia and histories past in simultaneity. Technology will not eliminate fear of the other or manipulation of the ill advantaged. It will only change the color of the developments. The resolution is controllable, however; generations can strengthen or weaken the picture for both themselves and the whole.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Steerage</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341147?profile=original"><img width="504" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341147?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="504"/></a><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"></p>
<p align="center">A human dances with a flying robot. They struggle to communicate. They malfunction. The technology agent translates what is going on inside the robot's mind. Battery: 89%...Waiting...Waiting...Connected!</p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">I am encouraged to make the links clearer:</span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">Do you ever have trouble with your immigrant?</span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">Why won't this immigrant work?</span></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">¡Perdóneme! Hablas ingles?!?</span></p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">They keep at it. It happens again. They never give up.</span></p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p align="center"><span class="font-size-2">Eventually, working together, they are freed. They escape the confines of the Technology World and emerge back into the Human World, changed. However, their connection is a challenging one. It will take more time and more work until they can understand each other better. There will be more time. There will be more work.<strong><br/></strong></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341151?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341151?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://judithsamper.com/" target="_blank">: Judith Samper</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Our scanned faces decorate the walls within, pixelated and corrupted to dehumanizing effect. Wires festoon the cramped space like spider veins, and in the room's center the artist works an unnamed robot to the point of battery death. The representation of exploited immigrant is clear despite the lack of any human features. During our time in steerage, we witness the unceremonious sapping of three batteries, replaced with sharp call-and-responses between the artist and customs operator. The sharpness is necessary to sever the link of commonality.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3" style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>My Heart is a Traveler</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341305?profile=original"><img width="527" class="align-center" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341305?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="527"/></a><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p align="center">It started with a personal connection, attempting to understand our immigrant parents’ struggles and how they have affected our lives and art. I believe it was this deep connection that drew other people to this project, and to give so much of themselves in the process. Even if all of the parts of our world could not find a way to fully co-exist, I do know that it was the community around us, whose support and generosity made the project possible. Every person who joined the Robot Immigrants, from 7 Dunham to the set builders and designers, our performers to our documenters and tech experts, went above and beyond in donating their time, resources, and skills to helping this project come alive. They were the cells in our <i>Game of Life</i>—by surrounding us with their energy, we stayed alive. And in this sense, Robot Immigrants expanded beyond three individual stories and into a realm that included more than I could ever imagine.</p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">"I am bringing an open heart."</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">"I am bringing my crayons."</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">"I am bringing cheese."</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">I feel grateful to have had the time to reach so far down inside myself, to journey back through my ancestry and find that mythic story that enlightens my present life and propels me forward. I feel so grateful and inspired by the incredible artists who joined us on this journey, bringing so many of their wonderful gifts to make this possible. I love that we were able to share our story with so many fellow travelers from various walks (and flights) of life. Everything that we bring to the journey is a special part of it. The Robot was also born here from its own state of Otherness, and it too has its own story to share. Together, we shall continue to fly.</p>
<p align="center"></p>
<p align="center"><strong><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341266?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74341266?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></strong><span class="font-size-1"><a href="http://www.endlessinside.com/" target="_blank">: Eden Nova / Endless Inside</a></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">Returning from steerage, the air is lightened. We are welcomed by the true humanity. Not our base humanity of exploitation and fear, but the part of us that identifies with the similarity and simplicity of what we have to “declare” on reentering. Our earlier written stories are read aloud to us. Our goals, our travails, our pithy leisures and our honest intentions to join the greater whole.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;">In our personal narratives, that whole is the nation we've chosen as home. In the universal narrative, the whole exists in the striving for empathy.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>*****</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>For more on this journey and for future travels, please visit: <a href="http://robotimmigrants.com" target="_blank">robotimmigrants.com</a></strong></span></p>
<p></p>
<p> </p>PROCESS // Meat & Light: Inside & Out with the Night Bearstag:conectom.leimay.org,2012-09-25:5831649:BlogPost:270792012-09-25T01:00:00.000ZThe Night Bearshttp://conectom.leimay.org/profile/TheNightBears
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://conectom.leimay.org/profiles/blogs/meat-light" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340612?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: helvetica;">I sat in on the Night Bears' three day residence at the Red Room, part of Horse Trade Theater. Over this period, we discussed machines, bodies, and ate Indian food. In an attempt to document this process, Sophia and I decided to link photos and words in a…</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://conectom.leimay.org/profiles/blogs/meat-light" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340612?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: helvetica;">I sat in on the Night Bears' three day residence at the Red Room, part of Horse Trade Theater. Over this period, we discussed machines, bodies, and ate Indian food. In an attempt to document this process, Sophia and I decided to link photos and words in a heady format that can give you a feel for the moments and development of <em>Meat and Light</em>. Per Sophie's instructions, Meat is Physical, Light is Spiritual, Sophia is Emotional, and Raul is Intellectual.</span><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family: helvetica;"><span class="font-size-1">Photos taken by the <a href="http://www.nightbears.org" target="_blank">Night Bears</a> and Raul Zbengheci, words by Sophia Remolde and Raul Zbengheci.</span><br/></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"They must have brought me here when I was Meat."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Lightning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Fire Whipping Presence</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Causing a Stir</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Never Once Moving</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">First of all wariness. Ever the skeptic in relation to the documentation of performances, I felt that this was a photograph of a photograph, not of the performance itself. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-3"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Yet sometimes while traversing the mediums, it serves one well to release a bit of idealism, a bit of humanity evaporates in the best of circumstances, uploaded, chewed up, re invigorated.</span></span></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340664?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340664?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"I am willing to let any alien being invade my body."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Reversing the Patterns</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">What Can We Do</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">To Prepare Our Selves</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Physically, Mentally, Emotionally, and Spiritually</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">We Need to Devolve</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And it really begs the question of action painting and traces. Considering the futuristic scope of the Night Bears, perhaps the mere traces of being are more important than their making. As if to say that the Night Bears are archeologists in the future looking back on 2012 with nostalgic eyes, scanning the remnants of distant times. Maybe this is performative archeology.<br/></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And perhaps being lifted does not consist of a new ecstatic mental state, perhaps being lifted will take us to the cloud city, where all are immortal.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340631?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340631?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" class="align-full" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"Making love to the Machine before its gone. Before we're gone. Before there's no distinction."<br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Connected Energies</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Despite the Turmoil</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">We Come Together</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Open Experimentation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Probing Her Worth</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">The Scientist Enters My World</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And this photo never took place. This is the first time that it has reached a pair of eyes. No one but the eyes of the camera lens caught that phallic exchange of lime-green energies. </span><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">It is said that there are conceptual beings that can sense the fourth dimension the same way we can sense a piece of toast with butter on it. Everything at once, the train on every part of the track.<br/></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340715?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340715?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"KAPOW!"</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Burst</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Flash</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">And Only Darkness</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Excitement Abounds</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">As We Build Our Empire</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;" class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;" class="font-size-2">We discussed, at a certain point, the role of the Dan illuminating Sophia on the stage. Should this person merely flail a laser wire around her body or should his movements be more orchestrated, precise, and present. Ultimately, while discussing with John, another member of the Night Bears, we came to the conclusion that the technicians of the piece are also performers, that the line between tech person and performer should be removed and performative tech generated. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And Charlie Chaplin warned about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvjoWOwnn4" target="_blank">machine men with machine hearts</a>. Yet, as we are nearing the ability to emulate consciousness, the role of the one who uploads us is still unclear and unexplored. Who will be the new machine men? Will they be underpaid, overworked staff who merely scan us and send us on our way or will they be men and women in white lab coats building virtual empires, masterminds building their cyber-utopias, providing escape and a new level of demented Social Darwinism?</span></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340634?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340634?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> "Instead of thinking of it capturing my image, letting it enter inside me, taking snapshots of my interior, projecting those images which my cells can then enter inside."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Classic Sci-Fi</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">The Same Old Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Repeats Itself Anew</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Every Time</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Every Space</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Transformed</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">During the residency, John would refer to Sophia as meat. John, the ever masterful mind behind the lights and videos would place Sophia wherever was most convenient. Images such as the one above inspired the residency at the Red Room, trying to make the traces present, light waves instant, presence delegated.</span> <br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">And what better gift to give than to provide a viewer with the vision of the conceptual fourth-dimension sensing beings? If the amalgamation of movement traces can be transcribed directly to a video wall, where will individual gestures remain, what of fluidity? what of physical presence? <br/></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340672?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340672?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> "I decided that the only way to go was willingly. So I let the Nanobots invade my Meat."</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Cut Up Spaces</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Silence Snapshot Sound</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">He Sees Her Through the Glass</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Private View</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Giving Weight</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Waiting for Release</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Getting Carried Away</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Against the manga themed backdrop, John and Sophia act out a transitional act, the detective and Meat facing off against their coming nanobots. Yet, Meat is already poised to become taken by her captors, ready for becoming a virtual being. </span><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Of all the great journeys, searching out the Vacation Beaches, finding Jacuzzi Wastelands, heading West, crossing Siberia, what greater, more exciting adventure than traversing circuits and nerve endings. To voyage through the conscience of your closest comrades, to empathize like you never have before.<br/></span></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340674?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340674?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> "But what they didn't know was that I had been preparing for this all along. I have been tenderizing my Meat, so to speak, marinating in light and releasing into the invasion.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">So when the time came for me to get scanned into the system, I went in. But all they got was Meat."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Swirling Occupation of Physical Self</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">They Take Her In</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Into the Light</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">They Go Together</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Alone</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Tenderizing wants to be the good word here, preparing for upload, stocking mental supplies, capturing the best image of self before going out on the Greatest Journey, into the abyss of digitized conscience, of ones and twos, forever leaving the body for those aforementioned demented utopias. Where will the ones left behind remain? Where are the subterranean slums, the counter tops with faces missing limbs?</span><br/></span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340638?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340638?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" class="align-full" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"It started to spread itself all over my Meat. Penetrating every part of me. I could feel every movement, every breath of contact as if it were the only thing that existed. There was complete awareness and it overtook me in a wave of intense physical elevation." </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Skinner Light Fingers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">The Engineer Knows the Code</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Flash of Meat</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Constant Exposure</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Tenderizing </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Opening</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Meat Activation Video</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The images projected in the residency lacked faces. Anticipation and presence were strong throughout. It is clear that this was not a problem of absence. Rather, it was a question of how the Night Bears' minds multiplied and bounced off of the walls in new, alien forms. A vortex of light has traces. Though the photo above leaves one to believe that all humanity is removed from Meat, I would go as far as saying that her humanity has merely shifted. The more relevant question is whether humanity is founded in our Meat bodies or our circuit minds? More interestingly, how will our essence be lifted into the cloud city, how will it be melded, how will we relate if bodies become a thing of the past?</span><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340719?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340719?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> "So I let it have my Meat. Finally and completely, I gave that part of me to the Machine. And it took me. We sent off swirling and screaming into the ether. We released our human-machine bodies into another plane of existence."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Whose Inside</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Sliding Slithering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Indistinguishable</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Proper Union</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Indecent</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Radical</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Unexpected</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">How To Tell When</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">There is No Difference</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Really, the residency was about finding connections between traces of Meat's essence and its nontemporal representation on the manga screen. We have hints of her scattering hair and chin, sometimes the undulations of her face crossed over by rays of light. Real time transposition to a screen, necessary shift of conscience. </span><br/></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"> </span></p>
<p><a target="_self" href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340640?profile=original"><img width="750" class="align-full" style="padding: 3px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/74340640?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"/></a></p>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">"Meat is made of cells, and cells are made of molecules, and molecules are Machines. So I let the Meat into the Meat and became Light." </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Receding Away</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Parts of Me</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Illuminated</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">By</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">A Distant Biological World</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Droning On</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Into the Unknown</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Elation at Perfection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">In Ways We Do Not Yet Understand</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Perhaps We Never Will</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Perhaps it is Not for Us to Understand</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">We Need to Keep Doing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Keep Being</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2">Keep Meeting the Light</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-2"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="font-size-2"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The eerie conclusion to the piece took the form of Meat's now empty body floating off the stage, a pale yellow backlight forming her silhouette. Becoming Light consists of sending off all essence into the cloud, into hard drives and optical drives, the body remaining just a roaming cadaver, made obsolete by new options in cyberspace. Is this just a new strain of Romanticism? How should one begin to work out and prepare for the coming Singularity? Will there be gyms? Is it the role of the artist to go on and make the first incisions concerning this new state of being? Probably as the planet is running out, we can continue this human condition in digital files and cloud computing. Probably we will expand and expand and expand the way we have been for centuries, though this time it will be virtual and not physical.</span></span></p>