Operator: 100 Onchain Dance Scores Take the Stage at the Whitney
Operator's Human Unreadable began in 2023 as 400 generative works hiding dance sequences on Ethereum. From November 19, the first 100 scores become Act III, a live performance commissioned by the Whitney.
In 2023, Operator, the artist duo of Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, hid a dance inside each of 400 artworks. Human Unreadable, released on Art Blocks Curated on May 24, 2023, rests on a library of dance movements and an algorithmic method for generating choreographic sequences stored on the Ethereum blockchain. In Act I, every sequence was obfuscated within a generative composition. In Act II, that November, collectors could uncover the dance behind their token as a choreographic score, recorded onchain and bound to the original work, so the choreography became public.
Act III puts the scores back into bodies. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the 80 minute performance takes the first 100 scores (#2 to 101) as its raw material, with 13 dancers, dialogue performers and music by RYAT, moving between computational choreography and spoken narrative. The Whitney calls it "theater aware of its own construction," drawing on Merce Cunningham, Analivia Cordeiro and the history of E.A.T. The question behind the whole work, first asked in 2022, is how much of a body survives translation into code. The 3 acts trace what the duo calls "the slow recovery of the human."
The premiere is on November 19 at 7 PM in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, followed by shows on November 21 at 1 PM and 7 PM and November 22 at 11 AM and 5 PM. The November 21 matinee will be livestreamed to LACMA, Haus der Kunst, NODE Foundation in Palo Alto, PHI in Montréal, Nxt Museum and others, and the November 22 morning show to HEK, the V&A and LAC Lugano. Each livestream is mixed live across several camera angles, unique to that performance.
The work also spills into the galleries. Entr'acte, a database artwork built from the archive of making Act III, is newly commissioned for artport: A History of Internet Art, the Whitney's survey of 25 years of its online commissions, opening November 21. For a project that began as code concealing a dance, the final act asks for something a token cannot hold: bodies in a room, watching bodies.
Sources