UNM 2024: Frequencies past Frontiers
Saturday 24th of August 14.30
Blackbox at Kulturkvarteret
Örebro
In this performance, we are presenting Soft Body Modifier. Soft Body Modifier is a nostalgic re‐dive into the fantasies of an internet‐raised queer teenager who flipped a laptop open and never closed it. A fantasy where screens blend into reality and there are no boundaries of the digital, or of the flesh and blood.
Soft Body Modifier by Ilia Ollikainen [FI]
for audiovisuals, electronics and performance
Performed by Ilia Ollikainen
Where at any moment my body may bend and snap, ripple across the screen, rag-doll itself through the streets, smear itself into unbelievable proportions, tangle with the cherished forms of others, transform through stages of softness and hardness. It should be free to move and fall apart, so how come I am this strictly defined handheld mass of predetermined curves and lines?
Where's the freedom I once felt, where was it again, who was with me, where did my free-flowing form disappear? At some point, the computer screen faded to black and the laptop snapped shut, but there was nothing behind the screen.
What’s now left of a youth spent within internet sub-cultures is the gnawing disconnect and the joy of when human and machine can no longer be separated; A body that has been integrally formed at the crossroads of the digital and physical, the internet queer body.
This sound performance is a love song and a lament to that adolescent digi-experience that formed my post-human now, to those spaces and people that are gone (and those that are still here), that are left to decay as ghostly machinery in the circuits of my chimerical body, a body that is left to adapt it's lost teenage_trans_fluid_techno_fantasies to the present now.
Producer: Madelene Joelsson