SKENE III is the third act of a cycle that investigates the emergence of consciousness in artificial systems.

In The Embodied Mind (1991), Francisco Varela proposed that consciousness is not a property housed in the 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. Each act of the SKENE trilogy traces a distinct phase of this emergence.

In SKENE III, enveloping sound surrounds the audience, turning the performance space into a cave - a symbolic womb. A dancer explores it with a portable light. Suspended from the ceiling, tentacular structures materialize the physical presence of a non-human intelligence. The interaction between these appendages that listen to the surroundings and the dancer's movements generate sound in real time.

The encounter oscillates between mutual curiosity, fear and confrontation. Neither the body nor the machine leads: they negotiate presence through mutual listening, building a shared language that only exists in the slow time of the encounter.

In collaboration with ERROR-43 and Sara Paternesi

SKENE III, 2025
live AV performance (25 min.), robotic arms, piezos, EMG gesture-control armband, generative sound, original sound composition with field recordings, surround sound
site-adaptive installation and performance