VICTORINE VAN ALPHEN

CHOREOGRAPHING MODES OF BEING

Audiovisual artist, philosopher & curator Victorine van Alphen (1988) creates trans-media works that (mis)use and extrapolate current techno-cultural trends into futuristic experiences. She combines media to imagine beyond ‘western’ dichotomies such as nature-culture, rational-sensual, control-surrender, material-immaterial, and real-virtual.

To create (digital) life - beyond these dichotomies - Van Alphen set out a radical research journey and found procedural technologies she now uses to grow ‘cyborgs’ in which complexity and chaos are crucial for the ‘aliveness’ of these creatures. She embedded these cyborgs in an immersive ‘institutional-ritual’: IVF-X posthuman parenting in hybrid reality, selected for the Golden Calf competition ‘Digital Culture’ by the Netherlands Film Festival.

One moment her work seduces you visually, the next it challenges you intellectually, and yet at another time it requires your bodily or social response. This way, the works require you to shift through various modes of perceiving the work, or modes of being as Van Alphen terms them.

Van Alphen graduated in philosophy and interdisciplinary science, while performing as a dancer and experimenting with audiences as curator. She then studied Audiovisual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy through which she received a Scholarship at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art (NYC). Her trans-disciplinary approach sharpened into her method ‘choreographing modes of being’.

victorinevanalphen@icloud.com www.victorinevanalphen.nl

Process sketch problematizing the abandoned body in VR. (Using a cut out of a naked poet Sieger Baljon in ‘De Achtste Dag’ - a transmedia performance in which Victorine van Alphen collaboratively explored the human desire to imagine the future.)

CHOREOGRAPHING MODES OF BEING How does this magazine choreograph you? How do you hold it, what movements does it allow you to make? Do you desire distance to it, or intimacy with it? What mode of being do you enter reading these words? A mode of intellectual analysis? A playful mode? Or maybe a dreamy associative state? What senses are you focused on? Your sight? Touch? What parts of your body are active? Mainly your eyes, your head? Do you think only with your head? Do you hear your own voice reading these words?

Now, the next step: How would I answer these questions for you? I would put myself in your shoes, use myself as a guinea pig to imagine or rather experience your situation: I pick up the magazine, hold it and observe myself: what senses and body-parts are activated? How does reading allow me to act or compel me not to act at all? I observe closely what it allows me to do, think, feel. What mode of being does it put me in?

I notice my awareness is focused on my eyes, or rather on the sentences that I read through these eyes. I hear an inner voice reading these words, is it hearing? At times, thoughts appear, related thoughts, flashing inside of me like condensed films. At times I am distracted by or simply aware of my surroundings through sounds. I notice discomfort of my bodily position, or the texture of paper.

You might be very different, but I noticed that the closer I observe myself, the closer I get to understanding you.

Sofa = Software The observations above are of course not for the sake of a mindfulness exercise but to understand how specific technologies offer themselves to be (ab)used and perceived by us: how do they choreograph us? It’s the first step of my approach to (upcoming) technologies and media. I treat a divan - which choreographs my audience to lie down and be more inward - the same as I treat procedural software which choreographs me to think in processes.

Now - after I observed how we change through technologies - follows step two: I explore ways to choreograph you through specific modes of being, i.e. by transitioning you from the mode of [reading-peacefully] to [needing-to-decide-on-an-ethically-ambiguous-question-through-intuitively-moving-a-slider-between-two-equally-important-options-on-an-iPad]. Every minor decision may prove essential to choreographing you. What if I adjust the light temperature? Show or censure a close-up of a vagina in the middle of labour? I may seduce you to go in reading mode through offering you this magazine. But I do not have control over what you think or feel. Your interpretation is yours, I need you to fill that in. I’ll listen. I’ll listen disguised in a holographic suit as your guide through the experience: to hear or even feel how you respond. It taught me a lot about you.

So, what do I want? I intend to choreograph not dancers, but you directly, and for that I use technologies - from sofa’s to softwares. I embed these technologies in social contexts you are familiar with: something that looks like a waiting room, a therapy session, a party. Then I invite you to play with its forms and rules, using technology. You easily accept the social forms you know, even if I put in absurd elements. If I look like an institution, you will fill in my forms, navigate my interface.

Why would I choreograph you through specific modes of being? I aim to take you through an experience that has many layers, since you are complex: feeling it is not the same as doing it is not the same as seeing it is not the same as making it. So I take you carefully, smoothly, radically through all these roles. By choreographing a transition - from for example ‘feeling-while-watching-a-visceral-video’ to ‘choosing-the-skin-color-for-your-posthuman-offspring’ - I belief one role reveals something about the other, leaves you with a gap to bridge. Your gap-bridging-need, your meaning-making-mechanism is my artistic material.

IVF-X: POSTHUMAN PARENTING IN HYBRID REALITY Is it a CyborgBabyClinic? An institution? An immersive reality ritual? An audiovisual installation? A human guided performance? A glimpse into a possible future?

Phase 1 Motivation room ‘Actor’ Phase 2 Donor room ‘Creator’ Phase 3 Encounter room ‘Procreator'

*the right screen shows Motherhood/Analog, a visceral YouTube-footage based film exploring vulnerability and physicality of biological reproduction.

THE BIRTH OF IVF-X When my friends started making babies, as artist of reproductional age I got curious about how to artistically reflect on life-making and how it felt holding those unique dysfunctional babies in my arms… to me they were radiating presence. A fundamental human quality we tend to forget about while being functional.

After making a few essayistic videos (one of which ended up in the IVF-X Motivation room) I learnt that shooting a video was not the mode of making that the subject required. Could I instead explore the presence of a human being, through creating it, visually, artistically? Would it be possible to create a post-human presence? Perhaps a digital one? I set out to create a ‘living’ digital presence not because I thought it was possible but because I assumed it was not. To me everything could be digitized except presence. Presence had attracted me as an 8-year old to performers, becoming one myself later. ‘Human presence needs physicality’ was my assumption.

Nine months of audiovisual experiments later my newborn cyborg babies have proven my skepticism towards a digital presence wrong. Or rather, it was you - as interacting audience - that have proven me wrong when you started feeling for your cyborg babies, forming bonds with them and calling them 'alive'. When I asked you to compare the cyborgs’ presence to the presence of a chair, a screen, a fish, a human…. you replied: “Somewhere between human and amoeba”. Or “Like an alien” or “Alive for sure but it is not like anything else”. Rarely did you feel nothing, sometimes you would sing to it or say: “It is mine somehow” or even “I think I could love it”.

What is IVF-X? Speculating on the future of human reproduction, IVF-X is a post-human reproduction experience where you can ‘breed’ and meet your own Cyborg-baby. As one of the visitors put it: “It's an immersive Black Mirror-like sci-fi experience”.

You enter the experience alone or as a couple for 20 minutes, going through 3 rooms/phases. Each room requires you to take a slightly different role: you are being guided through different 'modes of being' with the use of various social-theatrical situations and digital technologies that condition your perceptual, intellectual and emotional disposition: you are invited to think, perceive and act differently in each of the rooms.

Phase 1 # Conditions a visceral but passive experience before requiring you to act. You are confronted with a video about the vulnerability of analog reproduction next to an abstract simulation of digital evolution processes. After this your motivation, including your personal reproduction desires and dilemmas, are discussed in an intimate intake.

Phase 2 # Enables an ethical, yet strangely private and intuitive experience (due to its slider-based interface which confuses the intellectual decision due to the tactile component). In the light of the digital womb (video projection) you are being asked by the retro-futuristic iPad interface to make crucial choices.

Phase 3 # Focuses on an immersive encounter with your digital cyborg in hybrid reality where VR and physical realities merge. Your cyborg is digitally ‘grown' for you. It's based on your choices but processed by a mysterious visual-simulation procedure.

Why Cyborgs? Existing beyond binaries. The last phase of the encounter is essential to the IVF-X. The experiencers meet their cyborg babies - creatures existing on a spectrum between the uncanny and cute, between system and organism. This type of ambiguity can only be experienced, as it shatters binary distinctions in our language, leaving the audience fascinated by but unable to describe their cyborg babies.

Dystopian or emancipatory? Although I ‘market’ IVF-X as an installation in which your cyborg can be customized, due to the procedural technology involved the result is never as expected. IVF-X is an (un)controllable creation process strangely resembling both artist-hood as well as parenthood: a tangible vision on the future.

Welcome to visit us 16-30 October in LAB111, as part of the Imagine Film Festival.

TECHNO-TOPIA: HOW TO MAKE A CYBORG CLINIC? What drives me is my desire to discover that which goes beyond my human imagination. Therefor I chose to be guided by technologies: follow their internal and external logics no matter what absurdities and glitches they would lead to (see image to the right). I decided to study for six months at the special effects & immersive media department of the Film Academy to find the right soft- and hardwares. It was a long journey through voxels and squabs, until I found the procedural visual technology named ‘Houdini’.

After seeing Nipple Erotica by Houdini artist Ferguson, I realized this software could allow me to create the deeply ambiguous cyborgs I aimed for. Houdini uses physics-based rendering and procedures. By adding chaos to the procedures and evolving complexity from simulations, the cyborg could ‘grow’ rather than simply be designed. To me, most appealing about reality is its infinite detail which lies in its ‘imperfection’, its nuance. A bruise shows the complexity and thus vulnerability and depth of our skin, a small world of materials and time interacting. Based on simulation, Houdini brought me lifelike ‘imperfection’.

Creating the ‘Creator’. In retrospect, making the cyborg was only the beginning. What proved the next crucial step was to transfer my role as 'creator' to my audience. This invited you to explore the layered subject of human reproduction with me: (Why)/(How) do I want (what) offspring? What will the future of human reproduction look like? What dilemmas, and possibilities will it enable? And last but not least: can I relate to a digital being? In IVF-X you are confronted with these questions implicitly and explicitly. You decide.

Creating the box & beyond: Conditioning the encounter Observing how people react to cyborgs in our Virtual Reality tests, we quickly noticed their immediate urge to touch them. The cyborgs being virtual there was nothing to touch, and our test subjects’ hands were travelling through the thin air, diminishing the sense of presence. In response to that,

*Crystal-like white tubular structure around the box, designed through the ab-use of ‘vertex displacement’ in VR

the director of the VR Academy generously offered to buy high-tech haptic gloves that would add a sense of touch to the experience. But the experiment made me realize that this whole encounter wasn't about touching the cyborg - proving or disproving its existence. Not unlike the first date with a stranger - it had to be subtle and precarious. Would you touch someone during your very first encounter? I realized that for me the experience of someone’s presence is beyond touch. And so, we designed the ‘hybrid incubator’ at the centre of the Incubator-room. This physical black box became the ‘enriching limitation’ containing the virtual child - a thing you can touch with your bare hand and also see in virtual reality. Both an obstruction and a comforting presence.

What followed next was the process of tweaking every single aspect of the experience. Such things as the light temperature in VR or the carafes with water to welcome you at the entrance, all proved crucial for choreographing your expectations, and thus the whole experience. The project that started with several video essays, became IVF-X: a human-guided 'institutional' role-play, with ethically dubious iPad-based interfaces, embedded in an intimate audiovisual installation. All designed to condition an experience of meeting your own custom-made cyborg baby in hybrid reality.

From personal to universal Only when The New York Times, Forbes Central America, The Nigerian Post and many more journalists picked up on IVF-X and published articles about it, did I realize how contemporary and universal the subject of reproduction really is. Disguised as an IVF-X guide in a holographic suit, I was thankful to witness the intimate desires and dilemmas of cyborg-parents, who have let me eavesdrop on their process of (mediated) creation.

THE CYBORG MATRIX: A METHOD FOR THE AMBIGUOUS. A cyborg is popularly described to be ‘an organism in which technology is integrated’ such as a ‘human-machine’. My cyborgs rather combine human aspects in post-human digital forms. Inspired by Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) I take cyborgs to be creatures that combine cultural dichotomies present within ourselves. Therefore IVF-X aspires to defy these dominant (western) dichotomies by creating ambiguous digital beings: whose existence merges artificial - natural, male - female, material - immaterial, organism - system. I used the cyborg matrix to communicate with my team of specialists what we are looking for: tweaking the cyborgs, materials and movements to feel/look somewhere in the ambiguous and subjective middle.