:iidrr Talks with
Zander Porter
November 2024
Zander Porter
zanderporter.com
Zander Porter (ザンダー・ポーター) is a US-American artistic researcher and choreographer-cyborg based primarily in Berlin, with additional frequencies in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Working between liveness and onlineness, ze interpolates (dis)identification and (dis)embodiment as phenomenological inquiries between surface, soma, portal, and psyche. Zander’s practices dissect and recompose attention and identity through gamification of gender, affect, interlocution, and subjectivity. Citing internet semiotics, hormonal technologies, corporeality, and surveillance paradigms with a mixture of curiosity, reverence, irony, and skepticism, Zander’s work critically exposes neoliberal orders of hyper-individualization and reimagines staged/documented ceremonies of the techno-social. Ze articulates byproducts (expressions, performativities) of this negotiation as (technogenetic, neuroatypical) matrices of queerer relationality.
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Could you introduce yourself and share a recent project that you’re particularly proud of?
(°▽°)/ /╲/\╭[☉﹏☉]╮/\╱\ :: hello / hallo / buen día / こんにちは ~ “my” name is Zander. The most recent and completed project from which I am still coming down has been produced alongside/within my MA (2021-2023) in Amsterdam at DAS Choreography. I am proud of its pleasurable complexity, its cerebral physicality and ceremonial phantasmagoria – manifested through paranormal modes of contact between the participating and performing friends/colleagues.
Titled 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} [“emoting/networking”] (2023), the work is a choreographic collection of micro-ceremonies to explore frictions between algorithms that produce and sustain emotional or psychological “expression” and offline vs. online networks. Researched and rehearsed through intra- and extra-studio intimacies with multiple performing collaborators, the work manifests a shimmering matrix of liveness which holds present subjectivities of each person/body alongside their crumbling unhinging, a processual unfolding through interactions and mimetic breaks with surrounding performer-device entities. Each performer dons a smartphone through a (non-)prosthesis on a particular chakra-adjacent area of the body, e.g., thorax, thoracic back, sternum, inguinal region, sinciput, occiput, coxa. A technician, working with Resolume, works through a dramaturgy for syncing live footage captured by the devices into a resounding architectural image-cradle for the theater’s four walls/sides.
A prior development/research residency experience at the satellite testing facilities and anechoic chamber of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in São José dos Campos informed an open inquiry for how to relate bodies as nodes in a network matrix to the gravitational and telecommunicative forces of satellite objects. In the performance, the audience, sitting in-the-round as a type of orbit-zone, is invited to witness the interstices of physical and digital body-image matrices as well as attune themselves to the ceremonial psychosoma of the performers and their (un)becoming collectivity – or (transindividual) individuation. Reverberating scholarship on individuation as well as technogenesis and “practicing the schizz” by Erin Manning (in her books For a Pragmatics of the Useless, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, and Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy) greatly inspired this work; she was also a formal adviser for the project alongside its manifestation through completion at the MA program. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media also grounded inquiries about “networking” in this research and eventual publication of my corresponding written thesis “Transindividual Equations/Matrices: Schizoid Therapeutics for a Post-neoliberal Cyber-worlding” for Performance Philosophy.
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3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} (2023, DAS Theatre, Amsterdam) with Isis Andreatta, Ahmed El Gendy, Lucas Lagomarsino, Alina Ruiz Folini, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Charlie Laban Trier, & Jakob Wittkowsky.
![[satellitic] 3M0T1NG (2022, INPE, São José dos Campos) with Fabiane M. Borges.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d26a2_32226610da0648d790389c6f1041f87d~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_715,h_715,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/%5Bsatellitic%5D%203M0T1NG%20(2022%2C%20INPE%2C%20S%C3%A3o%20Jos%C3%A9%20dos%20Campos)%20with%20Fabiane%20M_%20Borges.jpg)
[satellitic] 3M0T1NG (2022, INPE, São José dos Campos) with Fabiane M. Borges.
What have you been reading lately, and how has it influenced your current creative practice?
(x_x)⌒☆ :: lately I have been reading An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis (Michael Sakamoto), Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics (Bracha L. Ettinger), Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Anna Kornbluh), and Descartes’ Error (António Damásio), as well as rereading Parting Ways (Judith Butler) and Queer Phenomenology (Sara Ahmed), and looking forward to reading Fledgling (Octavia Butler) and Art and Cosmotechnics (Yuk Hui). Without attempting to unfold a yet-unknown or complicated intersection of all of these inspirations and their tangential worlding(s), I share the following…
My current creative output follows 3M0T1NG{/n3tw0rk1ng} with a firstly simplified question of: what/how to demonstrate or share of the spectral relationality of the soloing body, stripped of its proximity to body-devices (cyborg conspirators/interlocutors), in psychosomatic movement? As a work-in-progress title, unbetitelter Tanz (or spectral relationality in psychosomatic crisis) [2025] endeavors to understand, disentangle, and then disobey and re-picture logics and histories of “expression” in the moving face-body. Through careful curiosity about the post-atomic (post-WWII) emergence of butoh in Japan and (pre-)Holocaust emergence of an Ausdruckstanz in Germany/Austria, as well as the potential and unseemingly proximities of some of their key figures and forms, I am endeavoring to understand how to situate a neuroatypical question of contemporary expressiveness in times of war-horror, AI (through a post-internet lens), and “too late” capitalism (with all of its resonating trigger-markers neoliberalism, panopticon, consumption, individualization, instantaneity). I started a rehearsal of this more formally during a residency over the summer called Leonardo@Djerassi (Woodside).
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Emoji-bot (2021, ACUD Galerie, Berlin) with ketia, Harald Stojan, & Annalise Van Even.
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Emoji-bot (2022, one gee in fog, Geneva) with ketia, Harald Stojan, & Annalise Van Even.
You describe yourself as a ‘choreographer-cyborg’ working between liveness and onlineness. Could you share a project where you’ve most clearly seen this blend of physical and virtual worlds?
( °ᴗ°)~ð (/❛o❛\) :: hmm, 絵文字ボット：Emoji-bot (2021) is a hybrid video-performance work as an immersive installation, invoking immediacy and telepresence yet is totally devoid of any fleshly body. On three near-life-size body-screens, three performers enact a virtually in-sync series of highly choreographed sketches for the sapphire lens of my iPhone, fastened by a gimbal and held by my right hand as I perform a half-controlled version of the movements and expressions together as a directing yet invisibilized co-performer. The device mediates this intimate duet and captures it as a single-take (non-)solo dance or “social media” ritual. In the creation of the work, this single-take video was shared with the other two performers when they visited the gallery (ACUD Galerie, where the work was “site-specifically” rehearsed and produced) to edit and rehearse the solo before performing it once again for the sapphire lens wielded via my limb. Manifested here is a practice of onlineness-sans-internet, an articulation of the way the networking protocol of the internet corresponds to the awkwardly paradoxical dynamic of solo/aloneness and group/togetherness. Ultimately, the solo exhibition is a loud and luminous zone of telepresence whose forms confuse the distance between onlineness/liveness as well as movement/immobility and sameness/difference.
Could you give an example of a project where hormonal technologies or surveillance paradigms played a key role in shaping the narrative or themes?
(っ•﹏•)っ ==≡눈٩(`皿´҂)ง :: my first theatrical live performance ADHD Penetration (2018) was initiated through the concrete provocation of a narrative prompt: how to depict the velocities and corporealities of a “baby” which has been “normatively sexually” reproduced not only by erogenous organs but also by [REC] cultures of data, capture, and image-production/doomscroll? (How can ADHD be re-portrayed through moving between/beyond a nature-culture seesaw?) In intimate collaboration and rehearsal with Ewa Dziarnowska and Maciej Sado, a theatrical choreography of scenes comprises the work, from a representational (“queered”) act of “penetrative (dildo) coitus” to a family karaoke meltdown of subjectivities to a doggy-style-crawl meditation/hypnosis to the camcorder-wielding and performative incorporation of a planted audience member/performer. Itself an abstracted negotiation of ADHD through appropriating forms of performance/event/concert, the work has also opened up possibilities to re-glance at personal/biographical “vulnerabilities” that inform processes that have come thereafter. Notably/recently, I am thinking about an interpolation of “internet” and “pubescence,” a thought experiment that wonders what happens when a kind of “gender-hegemonic” hormonal technologization of the body (“pubescence”) is not only (and increasingly popularly) considered alterable through technologies like gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists (puberty blockers) but also through the worlds of neuroatypical expression and interlocution that occur through overidentification and activation with/through decreasingly vibrant or extinct social portals (particularly pre-Facebook) of the internet (RIP). This also extends to an inquiry about how “internet addiction ‘disorder’ (IAD)” emerges within constant growth of the pharmacopornographic (Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado) era, a condition treated in China between 2006-2009 with electroconvulsive therapy and culturally contextualized via or possibly also as 引き篭もり (hikikomori, social withdrawal) in Japan, amongst other culturally intertwined phenomenologies/pathologies.
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ADHD Penetration (2019, Fuchsbau Festival, Hanover) with Jessica Andrey Bogush, Ewa Dziarnowska, & Maciej Sado.
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ADHD Penetration (2022, MUSEION, Bolzano) with Liina Magnea, Billy Morgan, & Maciej Sado.
In your project X (or another relevant work), how did you critique hyper-individualization, and what impact did you aim to have on the audience?
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫ :: in I’m your pixelpleasure (2017), my BA thesis (Art Studio) work at Wesleyan University, I translated many years of analog documentary photography practice and additional Computer Science and Performance Studies coursework towards a basic conceptual impetus to ask questions of moving-image-self-portraiture: who/what am I and what do I look like when/why/how? These questions encouraged a robustly anxious experimentation with cacophony, multiplicity, virtuality, biography, authenticity, camp, and character, which manifested as a five-channel video installation simulating a post-internet self-portrait film in which I played 14 reality TV masc.-fem.-moms-dads-winners-losers alongside casted family members, friends, and my professors’ baby. The impact I endeavored for was one of negotiating a ridiculousness of selfhood through over-plastering and plasticizing a representation of self, through allegorizing narratives of procreation and individual success with skepticism, curiosity, and irony. I hoped the audience would connect potential quizzical-giggly sensations with critical yet bemusing reflections on the disturbing and entertaining theatricalities of commonplace/neoliberal narcissism.
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I'm your pixelpleasure (2017, Ezra & Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Middletown) with Tess Altman.
How did you balance the live performance with digital elements? Were there any unexpected challenges or breakthroughs during this process?
(〜￣△￣)〜 :: I almost didn’t! I realized early on that I find it quite challenging to truly incorporate and properly syncopate digital or screen-based elements with “live/fleshly” proposals for embodiment or corporeality in performance. It has not happened in this more obviously formal sense until 3M0T1NG, whose existence/extentness possibility corresponded with a gracious reception of various institutional or residency/production supports. I have always believed in the digitality of presence, such that in many germinating concepts or ideas, the inclusion of additional screens/devices in live performance reveals itself to be mere distraction or redundancy, especially when proposing reflections on digital techno-worlds. A notable absence of the device-materialities that largely inspire techno-ceremonial performances is perhaps the key to further understanding the technologization of corporeality. I have always been curious, therefore, about how to unveil a digitality of liveness (as a technogenetic imperative) rather than to bank on or regurgitate representations of digitality with preexisting conventions. I believe this is why I swim/oscillate between working on or producing video-installation objects/incubations as well as “more” live, ceremonial/choreographic works.
You’ve mentioned creating modular characters driven by hormonal subjectivity. Can you explain the process behind creating these characters and how they contribute to the stories you tell in your work?
▓▒░(°◡°)░▒▓ :: how do identifications with self through various media and their pluralization of character function on interrelational scales and in the networks of activity that house sites for performing identity (e.g., dance floors, Instagram, curated programs, family units, nation-states, organized religion, etc.)? When are characters more or less individually possessed and captured, and how can we attend to the hormonal thresholds of these processes? This intends to broaden but also critique the modes by which identity corresponds to practices of hyperfixation and self-possession (thinking with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study). In a collaborative work with Juan Pablo Cámara titled los Zeros (2020), we designed a choreographic-theatrical dramaturgy while co-creating a computational-representational treemap (a popular computation strategy for nesting hierarchical data), which visually juxtaposed different descriptors for characters or affect-states that emerged through exercises of testosterone-exaggerated improvisation. These states, sometimes more or less personally familiar/identificatory, became dissociated from their origin references through becoming modularly manipulated and replaceable nodes in a taxonomical experiment of (shared) subjectivity. The goal here as well as in my general practice is not to strip selves of subjectivities but rather to reveal the amorphously weird and less-hyperindividual (aka “collective”) facets of subjectivity, identity, testosterone, adrenaline, etc.
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los Zeros (2020, SomoS, Berlin) with Juan Pablo Cámara.
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los Zeros (2023, Pulpería Mutuálica, Buenos Aires) with Juan Pablo Cámara.
How do you approach creating intimacy in your performances, particularly in virtual or digital spaces? Are there any strategies or moments that have been particularly effective?
__φ(◎◎ヘ) :: Alien Intimacy (2019) and [digital] Alien Intimacy (2020), created in collaboration with James Batchelor, form a pair of works that temporally contextualize the COVID-19 pandemic at this question of effectiveness when attempting to understand and work with the idea of mediated intimacy. I think they are effective precisely because the pandemic, arguably a first of its kind in a post-internet epochal sense, implemented a pseudo-universalizing notion of isolation in particular relation to digital and social media. These works transmuted the hybridizing virtual-physical binary intimacy inquiry first from notions of impossible contact (considered alongside the physics-queering Meeting the Universe by Karen Barad) into duetting, dancing bodies and then eventually into a zone of pixelated, browser-hosted (non-)contact depiction of the performance work with added edits and visual/sonic elements.
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Alien Intimacy (2020, 289e, Ho Chi Minh City) with James Batchelor.
![[digital] Alien Intimacy (2020, Dancehouse, Melbourne) with James Batchelor.png](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d26a2_5aeb1841c8b540bda2d00caa48dac37e~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_718,h_404,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/%5Bdigital%5D%20Alien%20Intimacy%20(2020%2C%20Dancehouse%2C%20Melbourne)%20with%20James%20Batchelor.png)
[digital] Alien Intimacy (2020, Dancehouse, Melbourne) with James Batchelor.
Your work has been shown in a wide variety of spaces, from nightclubs to museums. How does the context of an exhibition influence the final form of your work?
｡ﾟ(ﾟ´(00)`ﾟ)ﾟ｡ :: much like this interview, the context for listening and attention is maintained as a precious priority in thinking about what to make, why it shall/can exist, and how or if it can be experienced/understood or abstracted/intellectualized/poeticized. I believe all sorts of zone-sites, from festival/theater to gallery/museum to webpage/Zoom-conference to university/workshop, offer unique architectures for attention that, when respected and considered, bolster chances for (un)learning and (re)formation of modes of inquiry, curiosity, and the negotiation of whichever artistic/intellectual/emotional/psychological/historical themes are being brought to some forefront of presentation or dialog. This plurality, while discomforting at times, considering the hyper-professionalization and disciplinary specialization of capitalist and neoliberal logics, also promises more possibilities for unexpected alliances to negotiate the forms and aesthetics of artistic and epistemological sites of exchange.
Your practice involves the use of both low-tech and high-tech methods. Could you share how you decide when to use one over the other, and what value you find in this contrast?
♨o(>_<)o♨ :: I think I have been asking this same question always in relation to my contextual accesses or privileges to experiment with more- or lesser-available technological tools. For one, I am curious about the technologies of corporeality, thinking with epistemological threads of how articulations of technologies of indigenous practices and cosmologies of symbiosis and shamanism (thinking with Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) can teach me about how to resee/rethink some instrumentalizing functions of our contemporary devices and the entwinements between these data, surveillance, network, and image-capture functions with the materialities of their colonial manufacturing, e.g., extraction of silicon, plastic, iron, aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, tin, nickel, etc. Moreover, the feminist posthumanism of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” has been an apropos and constant reminder that the cyborg is not a question of low- vs. high-tech technologization or advancement but rather a question of plasticity, wherein “cyborg politics is the struggle for language.” I carry this linguistic trouble forth as I ask questions about the currently overhauling forces of and discourses around AI; I will be in residency in 2025 at the Zurich University of the Arts with Julie Zhu to research dance and generative AI in relation to triggers initiated by unbetitelter Tanz (or spectral relationality in psychosomatic crisis), which was initiated in summer 2024 at the Leonardo@Djerassi residency program.
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unbetitelter Tanz (2024, Leonardo@Djerassi, Woodside) with Julie Zhu.
What are some of your favorite places to go where you live, and do these places influence your work in any way?
(シ. .)シ :: it has been a local and international play-practice of adrenalized joy to discover (in 2021) 펌프 잇 업 (Pump It Up), the music/dance video game from South Korean arcade game producer Andamiro, which apparently emerged just a year after (1999, near my fifth birthday) the Japanese Dance Dance Revolution, a game I played pseudo-religiously with my at-home PlayStation console just before my pubescence. Rediscovering and reinvigorating this mode of play, movement, and gamified corporeality (with its upgraded five step-arrows vs. four in DDR) has occurred not only in Berlin but also during work/study trips in Europe and Asia, as the popularity of the game reaches multiple cultures and communities globally, esp. within Latin America and Southeast Asia. Pump It Up as a specific system is relevant for my work because it represents atemporal (spontaneous, though sometimes competition-organized) community gatherings for practicing modes of dissociative and antisocial embodiment. This is interestingly enacted, though, through the paradoxically over-embodied and physically demanding series of algorithmic steps and hip-rotations that comprise the game’s kinesthetic effects, also often performative through their visibility by waiting players/competitors.
A primary gaming activity of ORGs (online reality games) and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in my adolescence corresponds to this tension between isolation/antisociality and community/gathering/competition/RPG, a tension which has greatly informed most of my practices and scores for bodies moving, relating, and expressing through/betwixt one another as well as via mediations or edits from devices and softwares. PIU is a live/living, historical-contemporary and globally staged game and community shrine/space which disassembles these binaries in ways I have previously had little to no access to, considering the destruction of community arcade spaces in the United States during the late-90s, coinciding with the sharp rise of all kinds of personal communication devices and hyper-domesticated entertainment and nuclear-family systems.
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XenoEntities Network (2020, SPACE10, Copenhagen).
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XenoEntities Network (2018, University of Cologne).
You’ve been involved with XenoEntities Network (XEN) for some time. Could you talk about how this collective has influenced your own work and the kinds of discussions you find most exciting within the group?
( ´ ▽ ` ).｡ｏ♡ :: XenoEntities Network has been a Berlin-based collective proposing hybrid programs which blended curation with artistic practice, focusing on community-oriented exchanges, with collectivity as a cornerstone for an experimental epistemological practice. Often participatory and relational, XEN’s work has highlighted fringe discourses, investigating contemporary and media art, post- and transhumanist bodies and minds, strands of techno-, cyber-, quantum- and xenofeminism(s), the ubiquitous dissemination of digital technologies of surveillance and capture, the (im)possibilities of virtual and augmented realities, the Anthropocene and ecological crisis, and future utopias and ruins of club culture. Functioning between 2016 and 2020, I was lucky to join XEN with marum and Lou Drago in 2017 when I moved to Berlin. My work within the collective has been an influential process of constantly intersecting pedagogical possibilities or practices, all the while maintaining skepticism for hegemonic pedagogies that uphold barriers of access to knowledge as well as pigeonhole epistemological legitimacy to conventionally certified forces of production, (“peer-reviewed”) publication, and dissemination. Not only was I able to build upon personal understandings of and intersections between my BA coursework in visual art, computer science, performance studies, black studies, and queer theory with intimate community gatherings in Berlin (and eventually in other German cities as well as Copenhagen and Melbourne), but I unlearned multiple conventional emphases on individualized authorship and “proper” formats for curation and discourse, as well as how to disentangle the artistic possibilities within community organization and curatorial processes.
Moreover, as an example, through my work with XEN, I was invited to co-organize an exhibition [titled (A) Dark Room Space], to which I invited an artist and writer (Ashkan Sepahvand) to present his text Everything I know about technocapitalism, I learned at Berghain, for which I ultimately produced a corresponding game-engine-rendered video work MountGrove Modulation (2018). Inspired by the text, the work visualizes MountGrove as a quantum, intra-psychic environment where post-worked and post-embodied imaginaries conflate as an atmospheric and affecting render. In MountGrove, our techno-devices are hollow, their presence ethereal, and their relevance amusing, ironic, or uplifting; literally, we are lifted up by them. I am forever grateful for the pre-pandemic moments with XenoEntities Network as markers of early exchange and growth upon relocating from the United States to Germany.
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MountGrove Modulation (2018, Agora, Berlin) with Ashkan Sepahvand.
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