In Atopias: The Homeless Wanderer, a black woman embarks on a meditative journey through the wild Caribbean landscapes, confronting dreamlike memories and traumatic experiences. This exploration of migration, transgenerational memory and trauma reshapes her voyage, taking her deep into her subconscious, where she encounters her inner child and ventures into ancestral realms.

In this non-dialogue tale, set along the coast of Vietnam, a mermaid is rescued from the fish market by a fisherman. As the hero carries her back to the ocean they are joined by two seahorses. Upon her awakening on the beach the mermaid performs a sensual dance. But her joy is short-lived: the waves have other plans.

At The Function (I Shake My Ass) is a hybrid video game performance in which maker Connor Cook controls live a video game environment with his body and a dance pad. The work emerges from year-long research into subcultures surrounding dance-based rhythm arcade games like 'Dance Dance Revolution' or 'In the Groove'.

In the niche subculture 'Stamina Play', efficiency, quantification and speed have an extreme importance, resulting in the dancer’s body to become merged with the machine in an unsettling and impressive way. In this machinic evolution of dance, the dancer’s movements are reduced to little more than a rapid foot wiggle. Cook’s research views the awkward, optimized movements of the dancers as an allegory for our contemporary technological culture under late capitalism, similarly organized around efficiency, standardization and submission.

The performance attempts to reinject the possibility to dance with technology, by reappropriating the logic of the dance game in order to articulate an alternative relationship to technology that is open, indeterminate and playful.

Connor Cook is a recent master graduate from the Design Academy of Eindhoven and previously studied architecture at Harvard University. He received the Pierre Keller Award at the Hublot Design Prize ‘22 for his practice of computational performance.