“A staged rehearsal of possible cyborg realities,” this transmedia performance-installation premiere uses dance as a method to interrogate how emergent technologies de-center the body and offers opportunities to assert our humanity in an increasingly opaque techno-world. In-person viewers of the performance joined audiences at other locations, including Texas State University, University of Southern California, and Tijuana, Mexico, who interacted with the livestreamed screening and affected the performance using their phones.
Inspired by the radical potential for connection and agency demonstrated by tech-savvy activists in the twenty-first century, Ether Junk was an experiment in moving from the singular to the multiple, and rehearsing new possible modes of surviving our current human–techno entanglement. The piece hacks familiar technological devices and behaviors, such as mobile devices, earbuds, and social media, and repurposes them to serve not as a prosthesis to, but in the pleasurable confusion of the boundaries between reality and virtuality. How can we all hack technology as a gateway for greater personal clarity in order to imagine new realities? What if this ability to imagine is the crucial skill we all need to cultivate in order to affect meaningful change in our world?
The presentation included a media art installation with commissioned works from dancer-photographers Sarah Annie Navarrete, who also performed in the work, and Carla Alcántara, from Tijuana, Mexico.
• Direction, Choreography, Performance: Erica “EG” Gionfriddo
• Media and Music: Eliot Gray Fisher
• Assistants and Performers: Erica Saucedo, Rachel Nayer
• Performers: Celeste Camfield, Alexa Capareda, Ginnifer Joe, Hailley Laurèn, Taryn Lavery, Mack Lawrence, Mia Moi, Sarah Navarrete, Rachel Meador, Oddalys Salcido
- Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Austin TX, August 30–September 8, 2019
The presentation included a media art installation with commissioned works from dancer-photographers Sarah Annie Navarrete, who also performed in the work, and Carla Alcántara, from Tijuana, Mexico.
• Direction, Choreography, Performance: Erica “EG” Gionfriddo
• Media and Music: Eliot Gray Fisher
• Assistants and Performers: Erica Saucedo, Rachel Nayer
• Performers: Celeste Camfield, Alexa Capareda, Ginnifer Joe, Hailley Laurèn, Taryn Lavery, Mack Lawrence, Mia Moi, Sarah Navarrete, Rachel Meador, Oddalys Salcido
- Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Austin TX, August 30–September 8, 2019