Audience as Performer, Exile as Affect

Framed as ineffable and thus notoriously difficult to convey, Audience as Performer, Exile as Affect takes the lived experiences of migration and exile as embodied ones, using sound as an affective medium capable of reflecting such complexities. This ongoing project relies on a feedback loop between the body and sound, mediated by sensors—one foot in the neurophysiological data they capture and the other in the imaginative possibilities that sound offers. As the sensor data constantly reshuffles and restructures the acoustic qualities, the aim is to bring awareness to the intricacies of affective responses by constructing acoustic textures that mirror these complexities.

As part of a larger project, Audience as Performer, Exile as Affect engages in a loop that connects the body, somatic data, and sound by feeding the data back into the body to expand sensory capacities and imagine unknown emotional spaces. The work seeks to harness the human-machine construct by activating the body, software, hardware, biosignals, and acoustic signals to transcend the crisis of imagination that limits our ability to open up to realities far from the familiar and personal, thereby speculating on other lived realities and spaces of existence. In this framework, the audience becomes the performer, responding to situations derived from exile and creating self-organized events where a sense of collectivity and empathy can be fostered around such experiences, without subjectifying the artist as the sole source of the experience.