A Cyborg Anti-Porno (promo)
"A Cyborg Anti-Porno" (2023)
Director + Writer: Mary Kate Ford
Performers + Choreographers: Dan Ortiz-Leizman + Ford
Sound: Mars Rover singing "Happy Birthday" and Brian Eno"LUX 2". Edited by Ford.
This ScreenDance explores concepts of Cyborgs, Glitch, Time Lapsing, and other Queer Phenomenologies. This project utilizes stock motion and other generalized gestures from Mixamo.com, dance choreography, and everyday relational rituals. Amplified, the choreography is woven by motion capture material created uniquely by Ortiz-Leizman and Ford. Throughout the piece, Ford's poem serves as a disruptor, narrator, and agitator aimed at lapsing the complexities of machines, machine learning, systemic infrastructure, and agents of autonomy. The sound selection highlights notions of isolation, relation, co-dependency, and antithesis.
The intention of this work is to highlight the avenues of a glitch - wherein failure, subversion, satire, and intimate authenticity are all possible. Building on Donna J. Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", this ScreenDance interrogates the slippage between machine technology and streamlining norms. Ultimately, this work explores what it means to be a cyborg in a world of technologies - digital and organic - and how our bodies and imaginations intervene, glitch, critique, and activate.