In Manifesto no.6 (2023), two performers wearing eye-tracking devices glance across the markings of the score displayed on their computer screens to trigger a series of projections, sounds, and flickering lights. These devices are constrictive and require performers to remain incredibly still, such that their only significant movements can be those of their eyes. It is this limitation, however, where I found the poetic core of Manifesto no.6. As performers are frozen in a catatonic state, their subtlest movements transformed into sound and image, the audience is emboldened to stare deeply at the alienated performers without fear of catching their reciprocal gaze. From another perspective, however, the performers represent a state of heightened power; their slightest movements prompt the electronics to gaze at and speak to the quietly alienated audience with burning, threatening intensity. The audience's relationship to the performers is thus characterized as much by intimacy as it is alienation, a dialectic familiar to the condition of living in digital culture in general: we are constantly watching others who cannot watch us, and watched by dead, empty eyes that cannot see.

Studio recording: