Superradiance (2024) is a multiscreen video and sound installation, film and performance by Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter exploring embodiment, technology, and planetary consciousness. It invites the viewer to extend their bodily perception beyond the skin and into the living environment.
The work combines poetry, dance, and insights from neuroscience, woven together with code, simulations, and generative AI to evoke a visceral, intimate connection to the living planet.
It’s one thing to intellectually know that we are deeply entangled within complex assemblages of life, interdependent physically, chemically, and biologically, across multiple scales of time and space. But how can we feel this connection in our own bodies?
Dance is one of our earliest biotechnologies. We dance to express ourselves, to connect to each other. Through ritual and ecstatic dance, we dance to experience union with the universe directly.
We draw upon the cognitive phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation,’ where, as you observe another person moving, you feel their movement in your own body. As Vittorio Gallese writes, “By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies … the ‘objectual other’ becomes ‘another self.’”
Superradiance leverages the cognitive phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation,’ in an immersive, ritual sanctuary, where invisible dancers embedded in animate environments transform forests, oceans, and deserts into extensions of our own bodies. And where technological mediation becomes a means of exploring embodied consciousness rather than escaping it.
Watching ‘Making of‘ below.
More information at https://superradiance.net