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what would it take to make that now? -- 27/05/2026

I saw the Wooster Group perform the other week at the Cornet, the type of theatre its so rare to see getting made nowadays. With all the hallmarks and energy of that period of the 1970s in which everything new in art seemed to be happening in New York. Coming out of the theatre we decided to walk off our pent up excitement, tracing past Hyde Park and then into Soho, myself lost in nostalgia for my own background in experimental theatre, and Yasamin with a longing to try recreate it somehow. We both reached a conclusion that this type of work just can’t be made in London anymore, not because it’s not the 1970s or it’s not New York or we don’t have the same kind of training, but simply that it seems impossible to get the kind of freedom and space they had to make it.

For much of the past ten years I’ve been obsessed with the culture and work that came out of the 1960s-1980s New York experimental art scene. Your Tina Girouard’s, Yoko Ono’s, Teching Hesih’s and Philip Glass’, even going so far as to make multiple works in conversation with two of those names, the most overt being 2022 - 2023’s I Love Or Hate Everyday, which was an interpretation of Hesih’s One Year Performance 1980–1981, or Time Piece for short. While making that work, I constantly felt the difference between our conditions when making these supposedly similar works. Mine constantly had to bend and fit around my day, truly taking place in the gaps between photos, while Hesih didn’t have to interact with the pressures of work and life admin. He spent an entire year just on this one piece, secluded from concerns around rent payment and the responsibilities of a job. It became a constant nagging of “if only, if only, if only” and felt like a stark reminder that times have changed and the lost of living has only ever gone up.

Looking at reviews of the recent Wooster Group tour, people seem to agree, you can’t make this type of art in this type of economy. Largely I agree, the price of space is astronomical (more than £200 a month for a studio space seems criminal) and most artists must be working at least a side hustle if not two, just to keep a roof over their head. But something within this forfeit seems overly pessimistic. What if, if not materially, than spiritually, we could recreate something of the magic produced under those conditions.

Running several of my own projects and groups that lie outside of structures of institutional support (LCLO and Temporary Space), the expectation that one can make any money from this feels squarely off the table. It’s impractical and feels frankly naive to go into it with any kind of expectation other than that you’ll spend far more than you’ll make. But did the Wooster Group start as a business venture? I highly doubt they felt lucky or indebted to the wider economic system that they were founded within. The 1970s in New York was notorious for its lack of support or funding for artists. While maybe not as foolhardy as it seems now, becoming an artist during that period was just as difficult and unstable. As the recent film adaptation of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1974 interview with photographer Peter Hujar beautifully paints, artists of the 70s also spent most of their time worrying about invoices, rent and who knew who.

So what would it take to make something spiritually similar to the Wooster Group today? Fine space is at a premium, but then why not host it in the park or the street? Or even your living room or bedroom? It would be remiss of me not to highlight that these settings also were big textual considerations of the day. While you would lose some of the advantages that a regular rehearsal space and a stage gives in terms of props and materials, that loss also brings its own set of advantages and textures to play with. While we can look at some of these works as impossible feats of days gone by, they all started with broadly the same question. What would it take to make something that came before but with our budget or reach? And how can we make the most of that difference?

27.05.2026 - what would it take to make that now?

kat

ears to hear, mouth to speak -- 19/05/2026

“The other Algerians present in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would then be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it.”

Frantz Fanon, This is Voice of Algeria, from A Dying Colonialism (1959)

Since reading Frantz Fanon’s This is the Voice of Algeria, I’ve been obsessed with this passage. In it he describes how people would listen to the revolutionary broadcasting conducted by The Voice Of Fighting Algeria, during the Algerian Revolution of the 1950’s. It brings out a yearning in me that is difficult to articulate, something I feel I’m missing and struggling to find a space for. It’s not just the community or the hope present in the image it paints - one where everyone is listening and waiting for their world to change - it’s something deeper, something that feels rarer in our current moment. A moment in which objective realism and social constructivism feel like two totalising oppositions to one another, rather than responses to each other, useful structures that together, help to give our world some meaning.

I want to focus on Fanon’s text here as his work is the origin point for everything contained in the performance (Micro-Publics) this essay is attached to. It’s a companion piece rather than a summary. This image carries into the piece, it haunts it, but is something I won’t be discussing too much in the performance, which is more focused on the ideas and infrastructure that was built on top of these images. Consider this the prelude to an action, or hopefully something more.

During the broadcast the interpreter becomes akin to a hunter in pursuit of The Voice. With the French Colonial Government enacting what Fanon describes as “sound-wave warfare” (an attempt to jam wave lengths by broadcasting over them, thereby making them inaudible) the interpreter, using precise wrist movements, must follow the path of the broadcast, around and in avoidance of the French signals, in hope of reaching The Voice. Even once audible to them, the signal is fugitive, on the run from the occupations counter broadcast, forever finding and slipping through the cracks. Sometimes the signal wouldn’t speak directly, but through proxies, other channels that could hear The Voice and were tasked with relaying its messages. The interpreter must be plugged in and switched on, listening, open to multiple channels.

In its fugitivity, The Voice also escapes its need for credibility or qualification. In direct conflict with the colonial engines that produce and authenticate ‘objective truth’, it sees the hypocrisy and decides not to participate. ‘Objectivity’ as a qualification to be held against meaning1, stands oppositional to truth, rather than in pursuit of it. The declaration of ‘objective truth’ is like the counter broadcast of the occupation, an act of pursuit, something that forces meaning underground, tries to make it inaudible. The Voice refuses the structures presented by the French occupation, seeing them for what they are; infrastructures of oppression, only upheld by attempts to engage with or critique them.

The information received by the interpreter represents a fissure, where parts of it remain but others are only present in their absence. That absence opens up space, allowing gaps that social knowledge can then fill. When data is incomplete we are built to make assumptions, form connections and build meaning. Those gaps only become visible when someone has the space to invest time and labour into the question, creating a subjectivity that helps in reading the absences. Intelligent critique doesn’t just come from a familiarity with the topic but with an investment, an emotional relationship. As described by philosopher Byung Chul-Han, prior to the internet, getting access to a piece of information would be a labour, but one important for the cultivation of curiosity and vital to the construction of meaning. First you start with a question, following that with the pursuit of a book or person that might hold the answer and through this a relationship is formed with the question. You have to sit with your question, the gratification is delayed. It takes on a personal dimension, giving space to hold this information against other sources or your own understanding, find it lacking and move forward looking for other answers. Something I’d like to add to this observation is its social dimension. When we attempt a fixed and rigid relationship, both to the delivery of information and that information itself, we leave little room to build curiosity and challenge things as they are present. It all just becomes noise.

“Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice.”

The interpreter acts as a representative of the information that’s being passed on. Through the laborious process of pursuing The Voice, he must now grapple with the parts he managed to hold onto. The people in the room have questions, and in vocalising these questions, allow for the information to interact with meaning. While only the interpreter can hear, the people are waiting, though not passively. Through their questions they are bringing knowledge from outside the group, asking about “particular battles” and events that they’ve heard about elsewhere. In this vignette, it’s the interpreters job to facilitate the community discussion. Translating the information into something useful, something that serves those in the community. From this collective activation, meaning is assembled outside and against structures of control, measured by the people and applied to the world. Information only breathes in its contact with a broader and collective (though not always unanimous) ‘meaning’.

The image Fanon uses, is itself an act of meaning making. It’s not made clear that it comes from a specific moment witnessed by Fanon, instead he is retelling a history but in the aural tradition. Not date stamped and without dressing the information in the guise of ‘objectivity’, but instead looking at the broader situation and considering how best to form and convey meaning from it. Forcing the validation of the ‘objective’ on his retelling, would only limit its impact, its emotional conveyance and the meaning at the core of his writing.

“The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.”

In our present context, we live besieged by the requirements of ‘objectivity’. Verification and authentication are the currencies of modern day information exchange, so much so that ‘objectivity’ is enshrined as something taken for granted in most of our interactions with technology. Large Language Models through their ability to sort through millions of data points, manufacture ‘objectivity’ within their results (despite ChatGPT’s small disclaimer that it is sometimes inaccurate). They construct meaning on your behalf, collating thousands of opinions and fragments of information, they present you with a ‘truth’. They are built to hide the process by which this ‘truth’ emerges, obscuring the role of translation and interpretation, ensuring that you can never truly know a piece of information presented by these models. It lacks a complexity that can only be found in grasping and wrestling with the thing itself. Its base assumption fails at the first hurdle, to assume a singular and total understanding is a fallacy. We live steeped in coincidences and contradictions, but these models don’t engage and can’t account for that. It’s deemed inconvenient for something to be beyond a simplistic or impersonal account.

Fanon gets at something lacking in the contemporary formation of meaning. When meeting reality, multifaceted and community driven forms of meaning making are vital in upending structures of control. While it’s important to believe in some basic principles, one’s own relationship to these structures is vital for the information to be more just context-light facts. We must hold this information to communities and worlds larger than our own. What fascinates me about Fanon’s image is not its lack of the scientific (the technology of the radio) or dissemination of the specialist (the interpreter), it’s how these elements are tested, their direct engagements with the community. The way it focuses on the social, the group on hand to measure these statements, hold them to account and evaluate their value. This community isn’t made up of specialists, Fanon doesn’t paint an image of fighters receiving orders, people whose relationship to the information is formed by action. Instead he focuses on ordinary people, engaged and invested in the revolution and participating through their belief.

The structures of ‘objectivity’ often leave me feeling suffocated, anxious to claim any kind of meaning or understanding worth discussing. When you take meaning and significance, and hold it to the standard of an ‘objective truth’, it becomes both the most important measure of the world and thereby so big that it becomes personally meaningless. Currently, we can have ‘answers’ to everything instantly. No conflict or friction, no need for pursuit or more curiosity than the fleeting and instantaneous. You don’t get time with the information, or space to question or build an emotional relationship to it. So we turn inwards, we seek some form of answer to ourselves. Make ourselves into something unknowable, but we forget that meaning is only truly made in its interaction with the tangible world that exists around us. Without meaning, subjectivity applied to information, it all just becomes rhetoric, emotionally disconnected and abstract, where it’s only important that blue is blue because ‘it is’ rather than because this information means something about our world or our relationship to it. It’s situated in a broader and deeper set of relations and thereby takes the form of a living knowledge.

That’s what’s beautiful about this image, it activates the idea of the passive. It doesn’t just imagine that this information is important, it gives emotional weight to its importance. It puts ‘objectivity’ in its place and treasures the act of meaning making, being in conversation with one’s world and conditions. That information must breathe and be reformulated in our social relationships, encouraged to exist in the parks, in the street, in the home, in the office, in the city, in the countryside, in the revolution, in the day-to-day, the 9-5, on the radio, on the phone, on the loudspeaker, and on, and on, and on.

19.05.2026 - ears to hear, mouth to speak

kat

  1. Here I’m referring to, and arguing, meaning as information given subjectivity (whether individual or cultural), playing off semiotics. 

objects and landscapes -- 23/03/2026

A few years ago my partner Agnes and I read a text by the game developer Stephen Gillmurphy called “personal aesthetics”, in it he describes the ending of his game “magic wand”. The whole game you pursue the titular “magic wand” and once you get:

“it makes a weird noise and then the world is changed, in a way it’s hard to read as good or bad. Certainly more cluttered - the plains outside are now covered in debris, gigantic heads and hands, pictures of the demiurge. there doesn’t seem like much to choose from between these places, so maybe the only thing you’ve gained is to have seen them both, the old and new, and have the old slide a little further into memory, the secret alchemical medium that can absorb all contradictions.”1

Through this, we began discussing the idea of a landscape of desire2, a framework to refocus and counter the act of constant pursuit heightened by capitalism. The landscape of desire was a way of us mapping our wants in relation to their abstractions. Formatting desire as something multifaceted, seeing it as something that is never just singular, but instead sits in a wider context.

a photo i took back in march 2025 on a gorgeous day down in Surrey

Take eating out. The desire to eat out, even when related around a particular dish or cuisine, is never just a desire for that particular food. Maybe you could be really craving ginger scallion tripe, but you never just stop at one dish. Going out for a meal is not just about the food, it’s the fantasy. You are cooked for, served food, you may have a drink, there may be others around, you are hosted, its a web of different needs and wants being met through the pursuit of a singular object.

you always add more dishes. please let me know if you have any notes on our order

Recently, I saw the Adam Curtis documentary “The Century of the Self”, which describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and mass-comsumptive capitalism. He attributes the link between luxury goods and objects of desire to the work of Edward Bernays, using psychoanalysis to market objects as cultural signifiers. While I question the simplicity of his framing, something in this documentaries framing of objects as points of desire, helped me formulate a kind of adversary for our ideas around the landscape of desire. Thus I began thinking about the object of desire.

In a series of lectures / workshops I’ve been giving recently, looking at my practice, technology and social art, I’ve felt weirdly protective over the prospect of pruning a particularly dense section talking about authentic desire3. I’d first formulated the bones of this while talking on a panel for my friend Wassim at Newspeak house in 2025. I was trying to get at what felt libratory and revolutionary in the illegibility of transness, tying the act of remaking one’s gender, how that renders you illegible to certain bureaucratic systems, to its roots in breaking down social archetypes. I wanted to make the point that capitalism is very good at repackaging revolutionary acts in a way that allows it to profit from these revolutions, but struggles fundamentally with certain aspects of trans identity. There is an incompatible tension and in that tension it must jettison core parts of these identities, otherwise it could threaten the system as a whole. To truly consume and repackage transness through the lens of capital, the whole system would have to shift into accommodating new forms of bureaucratic processes that would alter capitalism4 away from its core motives. To truly integrate trans people into contemporary society, we would have to remake so much of modern bureaucratic processes, contemporary psychology, understandings of personhood, infrastructure (such as bathrooms, bathhouses, gyms), marketing trends and more. Transness represents a schism from this social order, its a break and movement away from social pressures and placements, to pursue a more authentic relation to the self and thereby desire. This isn’t to say capitalism can’t find a way, I’m almost certain it can, or that it has tried and somewhat succeeded, but instead that it struggles to digest all of it. It can’t and looking for why it can’t feels politically important.

So in formulating this argument towards authentic desire, I looked at the sale of celebrities as emulatory status symbols. Forms of celebrity have been around for far longer than the smallest instincts of capitalism, but I wanted to draw the relationships around celebrities, products and desire, specifically focusing on what we seek from these relationships. What is it we truely want when we say, for example, that we want to emulate and be like writer, cartoonist and artist Tove Jansson5. What am I after from this relationship? Surely I don’t want her well documented issues with her father, the difficulties of pursuing queer love in 1950’s Finland or her struggles to prove herself as more than just a cartoonist. No, if I look deeper, I want to emlate her wit and intelligence, how accessible and earnest she is in communicating complex themes, always relating them to personal moments and everyday life. I want an imagined version of her relationship to living, how she travelled and loved. I want to live through the photographs of her and her partner Tooti, swimming in the sea and off travelling the world. I don’t want her life, I want my own to emulate something of the landscape of hers. A long term loving and consistent partnership, travel and excitement, an imagined confidence in my own ideas and capacity to communicate it through the world of the everyday. Through this analysis, I can draw a more authentic relationship to what it is that I truly want from the world, and open it up to contain something more.

something in this image calls to me

Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous framing of the Body Without Organs, we can better unpick these objects for what they are. The Body Without Organs6 suggests a container with no directly drawn connections, but that allows us to group things by their abstract relations. I find it a useful theory for grouping information by vibe, to then try understand why a set of things may all encompass a certain type of energy. Capitalism puts a heavy emphasis on the object as medium for self, hence the particular emphasis on selling lifestyles in the advertisement of say, a soft drink. This isn’t a particularly original analysis, but when we use the Body Without Organs as a tool to explore the relations that this object has (particularly in relation to ourselves), we can see past the advertising to look at the desire itself, as something multifaceted and nested in a landscape and from there ask why. You don’t want a soft drink, you want the feeling of a sunny day, in all the possibilities that it entails.

i hated this advert growing up but its an easy example for those who have seen it

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, sexiest philosopher of the mid 1900s, Paulo Freire sketches the outlines of a socialist society predicated on conflicts of desire. Here he draws attention to the ways that a freedom to desire, unbound by constraints of capitalism, is central to a free society. However conflicts are rife when authentic desire is present, these frictions and conflicts being at the centre of the collective and collaborative, with navigating them is a core concern of living. A pre-conceived idea of a socialist system leaves out the requirement of balancing and being open to the bubbling and frothing currents of collective desire. Its non-linearity, its lack of rationalism and its unpredictability mean that the future must forever be foggy and unclear and that giving it a set destination represents a form of control. Socialism is about fostering productive conflicts that allow for growth and learning, whereas fascism tries to strangle the future into the imaginary ideal of progress.

I like to think of this framing of the future as a landscape of desire, one where through the desire for something singular, we can encounter hidden and latent desires in its path. Desires that are unpredictable and complex, even in conflict with one another, and thereby bring about a world that has room for the uncertain or fuzzier connections. A world that, more importantly, holds space for others’ landscapes of desire. Rather than situating these things within objects, competitively sought after and undernourishing in their acquisition, we can look at the wider whole that they represent, making it easier to place them among others. To come back to my earlier analogy, if everyone is arguing over what restaurant to go to, it’s easy to lose the fact that what everybody truly wants is to go to a restaurant.

23.03.2026 - objects and landscapes

kat

  1. https://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/post/705461201521573889/personal-aesthetics 

  2. Agnes talks a little bit about it here in her essay What Can An Image Do? https://www.are.na/editorial/what-can-an-image-do 

  3. In ways it feels related to the topic but I’ve found a hard time justifying it within the wider context of the talk, but equally like it is somehow key or integral to understanding my thoughts on social art. 

  4. I’m centralising capitalism here as if it is a singular, concious being, one that has desires of its own. While this format is helpful here in generalising capitalism into a set of autonomous systems, upheld through mutual belief, I’m aware that to do this more broadly sets up dangerous blind spots. 

  5. Of Moomins fame, althought I would highly recommend her book Fair Play, for a beautiful take on conflict, difference and love. In it, she frames her own relationship through its conflicts, particularly drawing the relation between these moments and experiences of true love and companionship, framing love as tolerence of difference. 

  6. Not a definitative reading, just a productive idea of it that I came up with to try make some use of the theory. 

why a laptop orchestra? -- 18/03/2026

I worry that discussions of technology, particularly laptops or personal phones, have distilled to lean closer and closer to an analysis of online infrastructure, than anything direct relevant to the machines that enable interfacing with it. Yes there is a lot of talk around Data Centre’s and the broader concerns around large scale technological infrastructure but the smaller elements seem to have gotten a little lost, past a general feeling of phones bad, because social media bad, because internet bad. This isn’t wholely the case, Dani Ploeger’s look at the infrastructure of E-Waste1, Xiaowei Wang’s coverage of Shenzhai technology2 and other hardware focused narratives have emerged, but it seems to me that these occur often abstracted from one another3. The laptop is either physical or spiritual (ie. A method to access other worlds) but less often both. What would it mean for your digital companion, friend and enabler, to also have physical components and for those components to have morally deplorable origin points in the supply chain.

Groups such as SLOrk or PLOrk popularised the concept through questions of what the laptop can enable for performance, curating performances of works using sensors4 (famously old golf game controllers) as their interface with custom sound making software. As pointed out to me by a student recently, this can be seen as de-centring the laptop. Making it into a gimmick, which is quickly forgotten by the audience, in favour of the visual of just another electronic DIY instrument. That is to say, it’s not directly in conversation with what it means to make sounds with a laptop.

For a long while, I didn’t understand the draw of DJ’s, particularly those using a laptop as their method of performance. Standing gently bobbing, illuminated by their screen light, working as a glorified iTunes playlist, nothing seemed less inspiring of adoration. But I’ve calmed on this, mostly through the ways in which club music tends to restructure spaces, making the DJ a facilitator and the audience the performance. This critique is useful though in how it applies to a performance centring the laptop, how do you make a computer performance interesting? Visuals are one method. Shelly Knotts’5 performances circa-2017 exemplified the best of live coding for me. Displaying her terminal, there is a playfulness with which she goes about assembling her tracks, in full view of her audience, occasionally commenting with little humour-us asides, giving the performance a warm and personal texture. Putting emphasis on performance as a dialogue between audience and performer.

My answer, or more experiment with what makes interesting laptop performance draws on this. With a lot of my practice being in social art, a form of art making that centre’s human dynamics and relationships at its core, making performance participatory is a no-brainer, however this does pose challenges. How do you make interesting work that is accessible to everyone in its performance. Something that encourages and rewards curiosity, while doesn’t prove boring or one note for those that have more experience with either sound or coding? Also what are the politics of accessible art in relation to these questions? What purpose can they serve in an industry in which flashy custom software and technology is the desired focal point?

Here I want to draw on the study of anthropology, particularly on the etymology and philosophy of community building. When people think of community, they often default to identitarian definitions of community. An in-grouping, made around common ground within a group, eg. the trans community, the queer community, coding community, etc. It’s often an easy in-road to community building, find a common point and rally around it. However, this definition emphasises community as a ‘safe space’ for the people in it, one free from overt conflict or frictions. Those who know me particularly well will know that, while I see this form of communities purpose, I am skeptical of such arrangements. Likely from growing up within an identitarian grouping, my father having been in the military, everyone had something in common and that was fascism (while discussing this with my partner, she makes the important point that this is indeed the etymological definition of fascism, the bringing together of sticks). But beyond that I find these spaces somewhat boring, the lack of conflict feels unproductive and unsocialist to me. Adapting Paulo Friere’s thoughts on socialism6, true socialism exists within conflict, otherwise authentic desire is repressed. So I wanted to build the laptop orchestra around the broadest possible grouping of community, you don’t need to have any experience with coding or music to particulate, you could (and hopefully will) just stumble upon a rehearsal in the wild and take part. The only commonality is a vague interest in the events occuring. To paraphrase anthropologist Tim Ingold7 I hope to create “an unbounded collectivity formed of difference, where everybody can participate precisely because they have experience to share, because its not they are not the same as the other persons”. A community of productive conflicts, brought out within performance.8

For this type of accessibility, the laptop is kind of perfect9, its a fairly ubiquitous tool that a lot of people have access to, more so than a traditional instrument, and also channels some of the things I’m interested in when it comes to sound. I got my start making generative soundscape works using custom software - often working with dancers. I wasn’t particularly interested in traditional composition and even less so in mainstream music production techniques, but what did interest me was sounds relationship to time and determinacy, what does it mean to make music that never repeats itself? Or what does it mean for music to have no clear beginning or ending? So my work now is a kind of extension of those questions but moving away from digital forms and instead wanting to reflect generative forms of sound making but within collective structures, making indeterminacy out the conflicts of creativity and desire within a group setting. This is where I draw a direct relationship to the Scratch Orchestra10, in its attempt to make accessible and generative compositions for groups.

It’s also easier than ever to be forever listening, in fact it’s encouraged, Liz Pelly draws attention to this in her book Mood Machine examining the way Spotify funnels you into endless playlists to accompany almost any activity. A lot of this draws from the “Lo-Fi Beats To Study To” trend of the mid 2010’s, ambient muzak that has no real beginning or ending but also very little texture. It’s often divorced from a relationship with time, something I would arguably say is key to sound as a medium. It is forever in some form of conversation with time. Fine art and photography, while having some relation to time, are forever an expression of the past, whereas sound is strictly in its present. Therefore playing with that present, the tension of an anticipated or unexpected ending, drawing the boundary line of when a work begins, become interesting dialogues with the medium itself. However, this gets muddled in society ruled by the forever expanding playlist, that simply finds more to play to you once you have already listened to everything it contained. I’m rambling but I guess the point I wish to make is that there is a difference between asking questions around time and obfuscating a relationship to time, I am more interested in the former than the latter.

A lot peoples imagery around computers lingers on the image of a solo user, interacting with their computer in isolation (be that social isolation or physical isolation). This is common as they are devices built for a one user, with limited capacity in traditional use for multiple interactions simultaneously from different participants. At a push LAN parties break this portrait, but even then, they still often focus on each participant having their own individual device for participation. Pulling out of this image to settle on the social relationships surrounding it feels important.

There is a million answers to why a laptop orchestra particularly, but these are just some of them.

18.03.2026 - why a laptop orchestra

kat

  1. Deserted Devices And Wasted Fences (2014). 

  2. Blockchain Chicken Farm (2020). 

  3. No shade to either of these writers, their work is incredible. 

  4. Twilight (2013). 

  5. Herself having worked with the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. 

  6. Pedagogy Of The Oppressed (1968). 

  7. Who himself is paraphrasing the late Alphonso Lingis’s wonderfully titled book The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994). 

  8. Along these lines I am just as inclined to call anyone a member of LCLO than I am to state that nobody is a member of it. That LCLO is a vague grouping method that only exists for as long as there is sound playing. Realistically this is logistically false, when we perform I submit participant lists, I organise gigs and rehearsals through an open group chat (but still a group chat) and LCLO by its wording, suggests a grouping rather than an event or practice. But the aspiration is still there and I resist having events (where possible) listed as performed by or hosted by LCLO, as if it exists as anything other than a lose forming. I guess I want to open source the project, constantly trying to route it through a transparency around how it’s organised and conceptualised. Make it replicable, in the hopes that people will. 

  9. Though we have also used phones, such as in BCC with composer Benji Jeffery 

  10. Though I want to make something that breaks out from the echo chamber of classical contemporary music. 

hunger -- 23/02/2026

Hunger asks audiences to relationally understand robotics through the lens of desire and desperation. At its centre is dog, an AI-powered humanoid robot without ocular sensors, that uses a localised mesh network and olfaction to conceptualise physical space and boundaries. Initially, dog will twitch and gesture, as it processes its environment, slowly building a relationship to both the space and also its audience.

Dog will then begin patrolling the crowds, weaving through the tiered seating of the audience, over bags and boots, alternating between crawling and standing upright, inspecting its audience and demonstrating a robotic capacity to see beyond the visual, navigating through smells and physical touch. Upon selecting a participant, they will be ushered to the central platform. Actors that refuse this call may be forced through pacification, inviting audiences to witness the struggles of robotics through forced participation.

Once on the stage, actors are encouraged to cook for dog, thus helping it understand intimate forms of human communication through taste and scent. If the meal is satisfactory, dog is then programmed to replicate the meal through olfaction alone, recreating the exact smell of the dish. Actors then must serve the dish to other participants, bringing dog into rituals of collective caretaking and learning.

The piece evokes lost human traditions of care, through the mediums of data and exchange, replicating and entangling participants in networks of responsibility and compliance through compassion.

23.02.2026 - hunger

kat