FLAT

Adoration (A Two-Part Series)

Nuum Collective

Adoration is an interactive, mixed media, online installation

Hello?


Are you there?


Can you see me?


Can you hear me?


Sitting in front of my laptop screen, I lose my sense of my own body. I have no sense of your body. And worst of all, I have no sense of you sensing me.


And so I begin to doubt my own existence.


I can see you. Yes.
I can hear you. Sort of.


But I can’t feel you.


Yet…


Now that you have been reduced to a portrait of yourself on screen, I find myself looking at your face with unrestrained attentiveness. I stare without your awareness censoring my gaze. I look for invisible signs of something, I don’t know what.


Strangely, this feels more intimate than a physical embrace.


In our current state, we are like ground control technicians communicating with astronauts hurtling into space.


There’s the same delay.
There’s the same low resolution picture and sound.
The same glitches. The same dropped frames.


And the flat tone of technical talk even when the house is on fire: Houston we have a problem. You’re muted. You’ve frozen. You’ve gone dark. I’ve lost my connection.


There is something poignant about the heroic efforts required of all of us to be able to communicate through the brutality of data loss.


It takes so much more courage to transmit. And it takes even more generosity to receive.


Adoration is a series of meditations on the quandary of communicating online.

Can you see me?

Part 1 of the series, Can you see me? Is an online installation that plays out over 5 days. A live feed from your computer’s webcam is laid over a pre-recorded choreography of the face that traverses an expansive range of
emotion. Inside of this set-up we invite you to perform a mirroring meditation, 1 a day for 5 days.


By mirroring each other, do we become each other or someone in between? And what will happen to us when we separate?


Each day, a new video is released.

Click the links below to experience the installation.

Day 1: Hello
Day 2: Yes
Day 3: I’m not sure.
Day 4: Lalala
Day 5: The cup runneth over.

Can you say something?

Part 2 of Adoration: Can you say something?
Can you say something? was written in JavaScript with p5.js, PoseNet and WebSockets.

The second in the series, Can you say something? magnifies the glitching, dropped frames and delay that delete the subtle nuances of human expression and then asks the audience to come closer in order to understand.


The work is a performance specifically intended to be live-streamed with an expected 20 second delay between when a performer commits an act and when the audience sees it.


Then, we explicitly ask the audience to talk to us, to respond when we call, knowing that they will not see us receive their response for 20 seconds. And so we ask them, will you wait 20 seconds to see me respond?


20 seconds is a long time. It stretches the boundaries of our generosity.


What will you do inside of that gap? Inside of that empty space between cause and effect? Will you leave me? wander off somewhere else? Or will you struggle to stay with me, waiting, guessing, filling up the time with your
own imaginings of how I will respond?


When it’s harder to communicate, will you come closer or step away?

How Does it work?

There are 4 layers.


Layer 1: A performer.


Layer 2: A conductor uses sound input to manipulate the live performer video feed. Using PoseNet, we are able to estimate key points on the performer’s video feed: eyes, ears, nose, and shoulders. With these key points, we crop the video around different parts of her body to varying degrees of zoom and at varying intervals of time as a way to respond to the audience.

Layer 3: A voice invites the audience to join in a call-and-response exchange with the performers.

Layer 4: A microphone invites the viewer to respond.

About the Artist

Nuum is a collective of artists based in New York City committed to bringing multiple forms together into a total work of art. We work with a wide-range of forms: human-computer interaction, choreography, sound, visual art, and language, examining each form through the lens of an adjacent one.

Nuum Collective’s work has been supported and presented by The Movement Lab at Barnard College, MANA Contemporary, La MaMa NYC | Culture Hub, The Center for Ballet and The Arts, Soft Magazine and A4 Museum among others.

NiNi Dongnier 东妮尔
Inner Mongolia-China born, New York and Beijing-based, NiNi Dongnier is a choreographer, performer, and media artist. She works with dance, theater, performance, textiles, text, and emerging and used technology as materials in her practice. Her work explores complex configurations of structure and improvisation, micro and macro, real and virtual, local and global, and personal and social. Throughout, Dongnier conveys an interest in perception, embodied experience, migration, and landscape.

Dongnier’ work has been presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Watermill Center, Gibney Dance, National Centre for the Performing Arts of China, Art Basel in Hong Kong, Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, Made in NY Media Center By IFP, IAC Headquarters among others. She has held residencies at the American Dance Festival ICR program (2011), The Watermill Center Summer Program (2019) and currently at The A4 Museum in Chengdu, China.

She holds an MFA in Choreography and Technology from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a graduate of Beijing Dance Academy and SUNY Purchase College. Dongnier has taught at Beijing Dance Academy, CUNY Hunter College, and Barnard College-Columbia University. She founded the nomadic company FIELDMOTION in 2019.

http://ninidongnier.com

Tiri Kananuruk
Bangkok-born, New York-based Tiri Kananuruk is a performance and new media artist. She holds a BA in Exhibition Design from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and a Master in Interactive Telecommunications from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her work has been shown abroad in Thailand, Iceland, the Philippines as well as in New York City at Culture Hub, Roulette Intermedium, Judson Memorial Church, The Firehouse Space Brooklyn and Babycastles. She was a new media art residency at Mana Contemporary in 2019, she is currently an artist in residence at CultureHub, New York. Her work explores the manipulation of sound in the context of technological consumerism, examining human relationships through the use of transmitted signals, natural language processing, and bodily movement.

http://xxx.tiri.xxx

Mimi Yin
Mimi Yin is an interaction artist, programmer and educator. A multi-disciplinary composer of movement, sound, language and participatory theater, she uses human-computer interaction to interrogate the wide-ranging forms of human interaction. Her research and work have been presented on Governor’s Island, off The Highline, Chashama, Yale University Art Gallery, Gibney Dance, Danspace in St. Mark’s Church, Culture Hub, The Movement Lab at Barnard and The Center for Ballet and The Arts. Her research into interactive media and choreographic practice and pedagogy is supported by an NEA Emerging Media Art Works grant. Mimi graduated from Yale University with a degree in Music. She is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and is also a guest lecturer in the Barnard College Dance Department.

http://degreesofchance.co