Soft Body Modifier will be performed at Frequencies past Frontiers.
Ilia Ollikainen is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki. Currently their practice is focused on combining sound art, performance and text into performative events, realized as both collaborative efforts and as solo endeavors. The text heavy performances utilize autotheoretical accounts of instances of vulnerability and yearning, showcasing the complicated needs, questions and wants of a queer body. By centering their individual bodily experiences in relation to others, themself and our current material reality, their works insist on asserting their non-normative position as worth being known.

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.

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.

©2024

UNM 2024