Multimedia Performance, 11 min. 2024.

Performance: UAAD Festival “Jukebox of Dissonance,” Oct 19-20, 2024

Yiou Wang & Hsiao-Chu Hsia (performance artist)

𝘾𝙤-𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚/𝘾𝙤-𝘿𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙚 is a multimedia audio-visual performance that synthesizes dance input to craft interactive live animation interpreting what life is in between human, landscape and AI. From the motion input of the performer, the transforming, pulsing appearance streams motion capture and Stable Diffusion live prompting, to embody one’s existence in the progression from birth, to growth, to suffering and to death, performed with tension between flourishing and decline, entropy and order, particle and wave, self and ecosystem.

VIDEO TRAILER

This Trailer is based on version 1 on the debut performance at UAAD Festival: Jukebox of Dissonance, on Oct. 19 and 20, 2024. Enormous degree of freedom and undulating noise are applied each time this work is performed, so from choreography to animation, not two performances are the same.

INTRO TO 𝘾𝙤-𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚/𝘾𝙤-𝘿𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙚

The life progression of beings on an individual scale and the life phenomenon of landscape on a geological scale intertwine in expansions and contractions — pulsations. The process of life as anti-entropy starts from birth in chaos, and progresses towards stasis which characterizes adulthood. Growth is the process of finding order amid entropy. Until the living being begins to decay and decompose, life loses grip of anti-entropy and eventually death is the return to entropy. From the perspective of anti-entropy, all living beings are connected. In the context of Stable Diffusion image generation, denoising strength refers to a parameter that controls the extent to which random noise is applied or removed from an image during the diffusion process, which is analogous to anti-entropy, the way of life. There is a similarity between the life process, viewed as an organizing process from entropy (birth, or even conception) to order within entropy (anti-entropy) back to entropy (death and decomposition), and generative AI, where denoising influences chaos and order during the diffusion process. 

VIDEO OF ANIMATION (10 minutes)

This work’s animation part is produced live on site of the performance, by AI streaming motion data into generative images, and live prompting. On many dimensions, the animation sequence produced during each performance session cannot be reproduced: the choreography of the performance artist Hsiao-Chu is improvised, the motion sensor’s location cannot be exactly the same, the input of AI streaming, the changing of prompts, the degree of randomness applied to AI’s diffusion process itself, and all of this vibrates in pulses related to the music. The process wonderfully illustrates Sartre’s word that the process of a creation is creation itself. Thus, as a multimedia stage production, 𝘾𝙤-𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚/𝘾𝙤-𝘿𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙚 challenges the traditional divide between animation and performance, and redefines performance in that the production of each animation video is a live performance.

UAAD FESTIVAL performance video extract from documentation of Hsiao-Chu Hsia, Oct 20 2024