SKENE
SKENE is a performance co-created alongside ERROR-43 and contemporary dancer Sara Paternesi, 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 through Unreal Engine — 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: a Promethean gesture that initiates a ritual. The stage transforms into a symbolic forest bridging physical and virtual space, 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.
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performed at Play Matters exhibition opening
Artemis Gallery, Lisbon
02.12.2022
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videography + post-production - Pedro Estêvão Semedo / GARAGEM Prod.
photography - Cláudia Simões
SKENE, 2022
live AV performance (30 min), real-time projection, motion capture suit, field recording sound composition, stereo sound
variable dimensions