Foreign Bodies (2018)
for 3 + 1 performers, samplers, three mini speakers and three speakers on stage

Interviews with the performers on the topics of technological change, digitalisation and personal media use are the starting point of this piece.
Fragments of the interviews – played on three loudspeakers on stage at the beginning and end of the performance – form the associative framework of the performance.
Digitally edited interview fragments mutate into abstract electronic sounds.
Imitated by the performers, the electronic sounds are transformed back into pre-linguistic vocal sounds.

The three performers on stage each carry a mini speaker in their right hand, with which they increasingly interact. The fourth performer plays the electronic sounds live via sampler into the mini speakers. A tonal and gestural interplay of performers, loudspeakers and space is created.

"Humans are social beings. That’s also the beauty of shopping and travelling: coming into contact with other people. If everything is now automated, it won’t be interesting to go out anymore soon and you might as well just stay at home! / It’s like a fungus network! The moment I get a message or someone has seen something I posted, there’s a kind of spark. / My computer is like a diary. You open a window and look into your own inner cosmos. These are all your inner paths, some of which you aren’t even aware of. / Evolution is moving in this direction and at some point there will be people who will be able to cope with barren- ness and perhaps they’ll also think differently, but will they then have devices implanted
in their brains? / What happens if you just turn off the computer? I mean for longer, for several days or several weeks or months. / What are robots, what do they actually do? / Children draw them that way too, they have these angular heads and angular movements.
/ Cleaning is actually the most important thing. / Somebody comes in, hands you a tea or an espresso, sometimes it’s amusing and quite nice, but all the time? / Well, as long as it’s not implanted in my body and I can put it away when I want, it’s actually still quite an easy prosthesis. / I recently saw a man who had a prosthetic leg and it looked so beautiful that I thought: what a marvel of technology. / At some point we’ll let something go and something will fall by the wayside because it isn’t entirely part of our physical human life. / Everything is geared towards optimisation. There’s such pressure to constantly optimise yourself. / How should my everyday life be determined, by which energetic phenomena? / I don’t know – sometimes I think that maybe we adapt ourselves unconsciously."

performed by Katarina Rasinski, Steffi Weismann, Christian Kesten
maulwerker performing music, VOKALE RÄUME, Ballhaus Ost Berlin
UA: 12. May 2018