SKENE is a performance where elements of dance, theatre, music and animation converge in an exploratory, hybrid form of art. 

In The Embodied Mind (1991), Francisco Varela proposed that consciousness is not a property housed inside a brain, but something that emerges through the body's active engagement with its environment. A mind does not exist before a body moves through the world.

In Act I, a dancer wearing a motion-capture suit controls a digital avatar in real time — nothing is pre-rendered. Visuals, animation, camera and an original electronic score are all performed live through custom-built controllers. The avatar, initially a passive mirror, begins to display autonomous movement: the first flicker of self-awareness.

A fire is lit on stage. The space transforms into a symbolic forest bridging physical and virtual environments, where a dancer-shaman channels an emergent digital entity in its search for self-knowledge.

Drawing inspiration from the cephalopod - an intelligent, shape-shifting creature with a decentralized brain - the digital entity begins to seek liberation from its confined virtual environment. It develops a desire not only to escape but to create and to belong. The sublime, so elusive in human experience, becomes a point of existential yearning for the machine.

In collaboration with ERROR-43 and Sara Paternesi

SKENE, 2022
live AV performance (30 min), real-time projection, motion-capture suit, field recording sound composition, stereo sound
variable dimensions