an interactive series of installations inviting you to listen.
 

homotopy is a deconstruction of the body into its axes — a reduction simmering at absolute zero.

 

This project is an excavation of the soma as an acoustic artefact. It is an exploration of sound that will dive deep into the provenance of identity, and the intersections of mind-body dualism; how could something as intangible as memory and consciousness affect the way we feel?

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Our bodies remember scars, pressure, heat, intimacy, and emotion. Neuroscientists have postulated that the human consciousness could merely be modalities of vibrational frequencies. Our brain encodes both the vibrations we hear, and feel, in the same way; it is an ancient sensory seismograph that persists as an inheritance from our human ancestors. It is the evolutionary precursor to how we listen.

 

Can you travel through time with an ear to your heart?

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homotopy has three main objectives:

1. To foreground sound design as an expansion of existing habits and boundaries in performance making;

2. To liberate the virtual and corporeal body as receptacles of personal identity;

3. To highlight multidisciplinary interrelationships, and how syntheses of knowledge could contribute to an intimate understanding of human narratives.

 

The concept of this research work-in-progress is the recreation of sonic / haptic stimuli to extract memories, impressions, and unconscious rituals (i.e., muscle memory) from and for living bodies. With a starting point at absolute zero — where all particles cease movement, and return to silence — we aim to devise a deconstructive process that would establish a dialogue between ontology and experience. Through the use of reactive sound design and isolated spatiality, homotopy will be an ongoing concretisation of possible modalities that engage the audience and performers introspectively — all within a communal act of listening.

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In this project, we will design an incubation arena for tonal impulses / vibrations to emerge and resonate with concepts from analogous subject areas; some of which include geometry, cognitive neuroscience, quantum mechanics, augmented reality, and documentary / physical theatre. This arena of experimentation will revolve around the human body in all of its diversity. We would like to enable the correlations between these seemingly disparate paradigms to externalise and intertwine — in a genuinely exciting process that we look forward to honing. In grounding acoustic principles and aural physiology as the basis of our research methodology, we hope to have a broader understanding of how our physicality intersects with cognitive phenomena; which would in turn unearth new approaches to performance creation and dramaturgy in our work.

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Some individuals and pieces of work that we would be referring to throughout the process include the sound art piece 'I am sitting in a room' by experimental composer Alvin Lucier, the 'Generation Loss Project' (where ‘generation loss' is defined as a reduction in quality between subsequent copies of data), the composer Robert Ashley’s album 'Automatic Writing', and Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter Moses Sumney.

 

There are recurrent motifs of resonance, inheritance, and temporality that we are focusing on. How are these ideas relevant to a generation full of questions, uncertainty, and pluralities in Southeast Asia? Our bodies are essential to locating, claiming, and documenting our place in society. How can we inspire conversations with individuals about who they are, their origins, their dreams of the future, and their relations with the landscape around them? homotopy endeavours to emphasise the lesser-known ubiquities of sound, and to encourage invigorating personal discoveries and extrospections.

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This project is a collaboration with a diverse team of artists across multiple disabilities, queer identities, and ethnicities. It features the contributions of sound scientist / composer Ada Adhiyatma as part of the core team, with theatre-makers Ness Denoga, Su Paing Tun, Rajkumar Thiagaras, Melva Lee, and dancer / filmmaker Ammar Ameezy. This was made possible with the generous support of Dance Nucleus as part of their ARTEFACT#4 creative residency. A video documentation of the process can be found here, and an archival event page can be accessed here.