The Ether series explores cyborg and queer theory to imagine strategies for embodiment with and through our technology. We use dance as a mechanism to practice agency in our human–techno entanglement. We do this primarily by “hacking” or repurposing our everyday technology into performance. Here, we use queering as a verb, as an active state of imagining beyond this dominant reality. This is the real work of the cyborg: continually questioning, discovering, uncovering and reimagining; producing-reproducing-becoming; forever arriving at new modes of existence. We do this with our bodies in multiple spaces, with and through our technologies, to understand ourselves as fluid creatures capable of holding great complexity and of making great change. Our work here has been to willingly remain in the not-knowing of these proposals. To become comfortable in the unknowing of systems as we’ve known them. We are building stamina to imagine beyond this current moment, to imagine and co-create new futures.
ARCOS began the Ether series shortly after the livestreaming video feature appeared on major social media platforms in early 2016. This sudden and immediate access to real-time events around the world, from the banal to the sublime to the horrific, exposed urgent ethical territory for ARCOS co-directors Erica “EG” Gionfriddo and Eliot Gray Fisher. EG distills all the questions that arose into one: “What is our responsibility to each other as our everyday technologies transform our relationships?” Since then, the Ether series has looked critically at how ubiquitous emergent technologies, such as smartphones and social media, shape our understanding of ourselves and our bodies, and how we relate to and treat other bodies that we encounter, online and offline.
ARCOS began the Ether series shortly after the livestreaming video feature appeared on major social media platforms in early 2016. This sudden and immediate access to real-time events around the world, from the banal to the sublime to the horrific, exposed urgent ethical territory for ARCOS co-directors Erica “EG” Gionfriddo and Eliot Gray Fisher. EG distills all the questions that arose into one: “What is our responsibility to each other as our everyday technologies transform our relationships?” Since then, the Ether series has looked critically at how ubiquitous emergent technologies, such as smartphones and social media, shape our understanding of ourselves and our bodies, and how we relate to and treat other bodies that we encounter, online and offline.