SWOON ROUTINE

Please join us for a low-key sunset in Brooklyn alongside my latest experimental work, SWOON ROUTINE. The performance will run 30 minutes, starting at around 7:45PM and concluding just before sunset.

This work was done as part of the Backslash artist residency at Cornell Tech - for the residency I took stock of the state of the art in autonomous flight control software and designed this intervention as a way of feeling out how we perceive systems that exhibit ambiguous or counterintuitive forms of control.

Here is what is going on:

The performers are programmed with a simple behavior: they ascend to a set altitude, linger, and then cut power to their own motors and freefall until the last possible moment that they can recover. Then they restore power, stabilize, and repeat the loop.

Baudrilliard wrote about swooning that "Nothing is more beautiful, since swooning is at once the experience of overwhelming pleasure and the escape from pleasure, a seduction and an escape from seduction."

Relax - there is no narrative arc to follow and no grand climax (beyond the sunset, which will be lovely)! This is a hangout-near-a-miracle and not some grand theatrical apotheosis.

My hope is that as you relax with your friends you will also be able to watch how your feelings change as the loop repeats itself over the course of the evening. I can only speak for myself, but I get a strange string plucked in me when I spend time around this system designed specifically to frolic around the edges of its own doom.