Introduction and Positioning
GICA's Embodied Practices Project uses speculative performance documents to investigate the unstable relationship between human performance and what philosopher Manuel De Landa describes as the “machinic phylum”: the continuous flow of material and informational processes between organic and mechanical systems that re-organzies both. Using scripts, diagrams, scores, archival fragments and procedural texts of unrealized performances, the project examines the body not as separate from technology, but as entangled within machinic assemblages and language.
Positioned between performance studies, cognitive archaeology, and speculative aesthetics, the project asks how embodiment insinuates itself into disembodied aesthetics, by virtue of mirroring its human cultural boundaries as it persists within increasingly automated environments, and how virtual performance might reveal forms of self-reflexive affect that exceed computational logic. The resulting documents function simultaneously as artworks, propositions, and operational diagrams for possible relations between bodies, machines, and collective experience.
Performance Reviews : A Selection
These are short excerpts from a series of speculative performance reviews created by the GICA review team.
The queue outside the former marine supply warehouse on Vancouver’s industrial waterfront looked less like the audience for a dance performance than for a temporary evacuation. People in rain-dark jackets stood silently beneath sodium lights while tugboats moved through the harbour behind them. The work, titled Low Tide Index, by the North False Creek Movement Assembly, unfolded less as choreography than as a slow civic malfunction.
Inside, the space had been left mostly raw. Damp concrete, exposed conduit, intermittent condensation dripping from steel beams. A faint smell of cedar mulch and machine oil circulated through the room. The audience sat on movable plastic pallets rather than fixed seating, and stagehands periodically repositioned entire sections of viewers during the performance with the indifference of warehouse logistics. This constant displacement became the evening’s first choreographic principle: spectatorship itself as unstable labour.
The dancers entered almost invisibly. At first one mistook them for technicians. Wearing reflective rain gear and carrying long aluminum poles, they moved with the detached efficiency of municipal workers surveying flood damage. Gradually, however, their gestures drifted away from utility. A simple act — measuring, lifting, dragging — repeated itself until it became estranged from practical purpose. The performance’s intelligence emerged precisely there, in the thin membrane between work and ritual.
One of the most striking sequences involved twelve performers slowly constructing a temporary floor from warped plywood sheets while a recording of coastal weather reports played overhead. The choreography refused climax. Instead, exhaustion accumulated as aesthetic material. Bodies slipped slightly out of synchronization; weight distribution became visible; minor failures became compositional events. The effect recalled aspects of postmodern dance associated with Yvonne Rainer, though filtered through the environmental anxiety and infrastructural fatigue specific to contemporary Vancouver.
What distinguished Low Tide Index from the familiar rhetoric of “immersive performance” was its resistance to seducing the audience. No one was asked to participate in any obvious sense. Instead, the work implicated viewers structurally. Midway through the evening the heating system was shut off entirely, and the temperature in the warehouse dropped noticeably. Breath became visible. Spectators wrapped themselves deeper into coats while the dancers continued methodically carrying sandbags from one end of the building to the other. The gesture could have been unbearably literal — climate adaptation as dance metaphor — yet the sheer duration transformed it into something stranger and more psychologically charged.
The sound design by the fictional composer Leah Varet avoided the cinematic tendencies common in contemporary performance. Instead, low industrial frequencies merged with amplified field recordings from Vancouver seawalls, ferry terminals, and underground parking garages. At times it became impossible to distinguish environmental sound from the actual building itself. One heard metal groaning somewhere overhead and could not determine whether it belonged to the composition or the warehouse structure reacting to cold night air.
The performance’s final image bordered on absurdity yet remained unexpectedly moving. After nearly two hours of accumulated logistical actions, the dancers carefully assembled dozens of orange traffic pylons into a rough approximation of a mountain range across the floor. Fog drifted in from industrial humidifiers. A single emergency exit sign glowed green behind the arrangement. Nothing “happened” afterward. The audience simply stared at this temporary landscape while harbour foghorns sounded faintly outside.
In lesser hands, such imagery would collapse into west-coast melancholia or fashionable ecological pessimism. Yet Low Tide Index possessed enough formal discipline to avoid sentimentality. Its achievement lay in understanding Vancouver not as picturesque scenery but as an unstable interface between extraction, infrastructure, weather, and speculative capital. The dancers appeared less as expressive individuals than as temporary custodians of systems already beginning to fail.
One left the warehouse uncertain whether one had witnessed a dance work, an endurance exercise, or a municipal rehearsal for future catastrophe. That uncertainty was precisely the point.
Project 005.023.06.001
Low Tide Index
Dance Theatre, 2026
By the time the audience entered the upstairs gallery at Western Front, the smell had already colonized the building. Not unpleasant exactly — warm, floral, faintly fermented — but dense enough to feel almost architectural. The performance, Reserve Capacity, by the fictional artist Mara Ellingsen, transformed honey from symbol into atmosphere, adhesive, burden, and metabolic threat.
The premise appeared deceptively simple. Over six uninterrupted hours, Ellingsen attempted to transport nearly three hundred kilograms of raw blackberry honey from one side of the gallery to the other using only her body and a set of improvised fabric harnesses. The honey was stored in transparent industrial containers suspended from the ceiling at varying heights. Each transfer required the artist to climb, siphon, carry, pour, rebalance, and repeat. Nothing in the performance resembled theatrical illusion. The labour was real, inefficient, and visibly damaging.
At first the audience treated the event like an installation. People circulated quietly, wine glasses in hand, observing the amber viscosity catching the light from the large north-facing windows. But endurance performance gradually alters spectatorship itself. Within an hour, viewers began slowing down. Conversations diminished. One became attentive to duration, to fatigue, to the grotesque mathematics of repeated physical effort.
Honey proved an inspired material choice precisely because of its contradictory symbolic weight. It carries associations of preservation, sweetness, pastoral abundance, and collective labour. Yet in Reserve Capacity, honey behaved less like nourishment than like industrial matter. It stuck to floors, hardened onto skin, soaked through clothing, attracted heat and debris. Ellingsen’s body became progressively coated in crystallizing residue until she resembled not a performer but a partially fossilized worker excavated from an unknown agricultural disaster.
The most difficult sequence occurred midway through the evening. After repeated lifting, the artist’s right shoulder visibly began to fail. Her arm trembled violently whenever tension entered the harness system. Rather than conceal the deterioration, the performance reorganized itself around incapacity. Transfers slowed from minutes to nearly half an hour each. Audience members shifted uncomfortably between empathy and voyeurism. One sensed the room collectively negotiating the ethics of watching someone continue beyond reasonable physical limits.
The piece inevitably recalled earlier endurance practices associated with Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, though Ellingsen’s work rejected the ascetic severity that often accompanies that lineage. Instead, Reserve Capacity remained stubbornly materialist. The performance was less about transcendence than about bodily negotiation with substance, weight, friction, sugar, and exhaustion. The honey functioned not metaphorically but operationally.
Particularly effective was the sound environment by fictional composer Joel Ramm, who amplified microscopic audio from the honey itself: bubbles collapsing, viscosity shifting, slow internal movement within heated containers. These sounds merged with Ellingsen’s breathing and the subtle noises of strain — fabric tightening, joints cracking, shoes peeling away from sticky floors. By the final hours, the gallery sounded less like an art space than a malfunctioning food-processing facility.
What prevented the work from collapsing into mere spectacle was its refusal of catharsis. No symbolic breakthrough arrived. No triumphant completion redeemed the suffering on display. In fact, the final transfer failed outright. One container slipped during lowering, spilling honey catastrophically across the concrete floor. The artist simply sat down in the expanding pool, breathing heavily, unable or unwilling to continue. House lights remained unchanged. Audience members quietly began leaving.
That unresolved ending gave the performance its disturbing resonance. Reserve Capacity was ultimately less concerned with endurance than with depletion — ecological, physical, emotional, economic. Honey, ordinarily fetishized as natural purity, became a concentrated archive of labour: floral labour, insect labour, agricultural labour, bodily labour. Ellingsen transformed sweetness into an index of extraction.
Leaving the Western Front afterward, one noticed that the smell lingered on clothing long after the performance ended. It felt less like documentation than contamination.
Project 005.023.06.001
Reserve Capacity
Performance Art, 2025
Peter Dittmer’s Die Amme anticipated many of the dynamics now associated with AI-generated art, but it did so by making the audience’s participation unusually visible, uncomfortable, and reciprocal.
In Die Amme (1992–2005), viewers entered into a text-based dialogue with a machine that responded through an evolving archive of prior conversations. The work’s “personality” emerged from accumulated audience interactions: Dittmer selectively incorporated fragments of previous exchanges into the system’s linguistic repertoire. The installation therefore functioned less as a static artwork than as a social and conversational ecology. (The Poetry Foundation)
What distinguishes Die Amme from much contemporary AI-generated work is the degree to which the audience becomes implicated in the construction of the system itself. The viewer is not simply prompting a machine to produce an image or text; the viewer is effectively training, provoking, and psychologically shaping the machine over time. The installation stages a feedback loop between human aggression, curiosity, boredom, humour, and machinic response. The famous act of the machine spilling a glass of milk becomes a performative reward, almost like an emotional outburst that audiences attempt to trigger through manipulation or rhetorical pressure. (The Poetry Foundation)
This differs from most contemporary AI image generators and large language models, where audience participation is simultaneously broader and more opaque. AI-generated works today often depend on massive, invisible datasets and distributed user interactions. The audience contributes prompts, ratings, and behavioural data, but these contributions are abstracted into statistical optimization processes. Users participate continuously, yet their participation is concealed behind corporate infrastructures and machine-learning architectures.
By contrast, Die Amme theatricalizes participation. The audience can perceive the relationship between input and response, frustration and reaction. Dittmer exposes the instability of dialogue between human and machine instead of smoothing it into seamless utility. The work foregrounds failure, stubbornness, repetition, and irritation. In this sense, the audience encounters the machine not as an efficient servant but as an adversarial or resistant interlocutor.
There is also a crucial difference in authorship. Many AI-generated artworks today position the user as a “prompt author,” someone who directs generative systems toward aesthetic outputs. In Die Amme, however, authorship is radically dispersed. Dittmer designed the framework, but the language emerged from accumulated conversations, accidental exchanges, and iterative social contamination. The audience does not merely consume the work; it becomes sedimented inside the work.
This makes Die Amme closer to a living archive of social behaviour than to contemporary generative spectacle. While today’s AI systems often aim for fluency and frictionless realism, Dittmer’s installation emphasized awkwardness and rhetorical tension. The audience became aware not only of the machine’s artificiality, but also of its own compulsive desire to anthropomorphize, dominate, or emotionally engage with the system.
In retrospect, Die Amme appears remarkably prescient. It anticipated contemporary concerns around conversational AI, emergent machine personality, participatory training, and the blurred boundary between user and system. Yet unlike many current AI works, it transformed audience involvement into the central aesthetic material of the artwork itself.
Project 005.023.06.001
Die Amme/The Wetnurse
Installation, 1992-2005
Note: This is a 'real' work
