[google docs live editing (or a dance floor) > 2 artificial identities + 1 opening + hearst castle inspiration + joules > james zabiela/sasha involv3r time constraint and emergent poem = 'jewel box']

[google docs live editing (or a dance floor) > 2 artificial identities + 2 poems > lexaunculpt time constraint and danced remix to 3rd poem = 'pas de deux']

xxx

kleinian kisses need stitching
breathing, and leaking
at the seams

seems like only yesterday
you tore free
from me, in me
and me to be

xxx

come, rated as such and dated as much
blue breath whispers
sizzzling
time written flee

xxx

seems extreme
this veering theme

xxx

explosive dreams need sequencing
mines stuttering cuts and pasting
and stitching
ocular gauze
visibly

xxx

three stitches or less
by exxxtension
impulsive tears by the tens
in another frame of mine

images of thought lying tattered
knead breath, defibrilly

An aesthetico-ethical gamespace is pre-imaged in Austin, TX, featuring a topological folding of the infamous Pac-Man videogame. The Department of Biological Flow players are to move in variations of the 8-bit robotic through grid-like formations around the irregular gameboard.

Banana rewards await, and will be ingested.

Just as Pac-Man folds in upon itself at death, so too will the players — attempting an inversion of the body as if a contracting klein bottle in the death throes of impulsion. The banana peel remains — as remains — of this infolding or unfolding. And again and again, until the gaming process is complete.

Only en route do they find out the gamespace has already begun.

Performance time: approximately 3.5 hours or 20 minutes.

A site-specific performance in Frankfurt, Germany. Relational gait surfing bodies are prosthetically extended by means of balloon semio-technologies. The tempos and ethics of the surf must be recalibrated and renegotiated for this windy performative context. From displeasure emerges pleasure.

Jacques Derrida suggests that the concept of hospitality is innately bound to that of owning private property, not to mention a certain politics of gendered violence that reaches back centuries in western culture. Today the contemporary market era seeks to commodify and make property out of all flows—not just tangible ones like property-as-territory, but immaterial flows, speech-acts, ideas and perhaps someday even thought itself.

Press Play is a process machine offered by the Department of Biological Flow as a response to three concepts discussed in Avital Ronell’s 2012 summer seminar at the European Graduate School: ‘hospitality’, ‘authority’ and ‘gift’. Can hospitality be extended or offered in contexts wherein property rights accrue to no members of the community, or in which the idea of territory itself is under negotiation or in flux?

Day One of the Press Play process engaged the ‘gift’ as an operative gesture of hospitality in the ‘communal’ spaces of pedagogy, while questioning ‘authority’ in a ludic sense through language-based interventions. These offerings were left unattended for two days to see what would be catalyzed. Day Two of Press Play then attempted a topological inversion of the first day, in which the ‘gift’ was expressed more in language while ‘authority’ was felt more pronouncedly in gesture.

In so doing, we hoped to effervesce certain affects, thoughts and dialogues concerning hospitality as the zone of indiscernibility between authority and gift—but also as a concept that may find fresh theoretical possibilities in new spaces and times of the common.