2025 production | worlding-in-progress

With Alina Tofan (performance capture), Ștefan Blănică (music)

WORLDING-IN-PROGRESS: Streamborn evokes an origin story connected deeply to water. Not only we emerge from streams and waterways but also we are born into a world of interconnected spirits and energies. How do we interact with the water around us when we are in the forest of spirits, following the protocols of animacy?

WORLDING-IN-PROGRESS: How can we enter a stream, situating ourselves in relation with water, animals, and with everything that contains spirit in different shapes of water? Myths aren’t abstract ideas, they are meant to incorporate the somatic experience of ancestry and the relations in nature, not only for humans. 

WORLDING-IN-PROGRESS: Modern culture goes hand-in-hand with the eradication of the belief that spirits exist in all matters. The Earth became inanimate, un-interactive, intertwined with colonial violence and extraction. Modern Western philosophy conceives reason and concept as more elevated (modern) and detached from the body, but if you look closely, art is yearning to be embodied. Aside from criticizing the problematic framework, we build an alternative, practicing our mechanics of reconnecting with our ancestors, with the water spirits that were present with our ancestors. We practice it hardcore by the act of worldbuilding, not with grand philosophy or scholarly talk, but with the concrete technique of data capture and transfer, virtual avatars, visual effects, and simulations.

WORLDING-IN-PROGRESS: Streamborn is a multimedia performance integrating avatar motion capture, immersive projections, and interactive media to explore ancestral and ecological relationships with water. Rooted in animism, hydrofeminism, and ecoperformance, it evokes a mythic origin story where water is a living, animistic presence. Audiences are guided into a “forest of spirits,” reconnecting with water as a dynamic entity imbued with life, fostering relationality across human and non-human realms.

The performer’s movements are captured and mapped onto avatars that visually inhabit the stream, creating a living simulacrum. These avatars representing the personhood of water, mirror the performer’s gestures while responding to participants’ interactions, creating a reciprocal relationship.

WORLDING-IN-PROGRESS: Alina Tofan is an ecoperformance artist who conceives the body as an environment, becoming all things around her, practicing shapeshifting embodiment as a main technique. We have been working in deep collaboration on the theme of water since the beginning of 2024, merging performance with new media, completing metempsychosis – the migration of spirit between bodies. This time, we are preparing to bring our musings to an interactive performance, a moment to reconnect with animacy. 

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Below are some images of teasers 1-3 as well as The Portal (lenticular print) in Yiou Wang: Becoming Other solo exhibition, The BLANC.

In the design of the major avatar in Streamborn, Yiou rebuilds her old unnamed avatar in WAGWIWTG (2024), but remade the skin shader to appear amphibian-like with a moist shimmer. Yiou likes the forms of pelvis, spine and orchid and thinks of them as a good combo, so the “head” is something in between the three. The body is tattooed with red organic patterns that mimic the red veins of a leaf or a petal. The reason why all these avatars from the Water world(s) are humanoid is for facilitating the mechanic of motion data transfer from Alina, who is of a humanoid shape (most of the time).

This limited edition print is available from The BLANC (info@theblanc.art).