III: Once Returned

The rhythm of our daily lives and relationships is inextricably entangled with ongoing scientific, artistic, and philosophical reincarnations of the “clock”. Importantly, these tools for planning and tracking time are not only descriptive but prescriptive of human behaviors. Design choices such as the discretization of time into days, hours, minutes, and seconds provides a structure for managing and measuring behaviors over time — on the condition that the behavior being aligned to a clock may also be discretized, for example: one step, one gesture, one breath, one heartbeat.

In my collaborative practice-as-research, I examine timekeeping systems as a form of choreography. In a recent project called “III: Once Returned”, created and performed with composer/computer scientist John MacCallum, we scored our every action, down to each inhale and exhale, over the course of a continuous, 72-hour livestream performance. As we endured for three full days and nights, each attempting to correlate our temporality with the pre-composed metronome, we were also accompanied by a pig heart that decomposed between us at its own pace. Throughout, we wore electrocardiograms (ECGs), from which heart rate data was used to inform the temporality of the music for the audience.

The multiple, irreconcilable temporal processes unfolding over the course of this extended- duration performance were tethered by our shared context and intention. Sustaining temporal alignments the various performers – us, the heart, the metronome, the music, the streaming platform, the video software, etc. – required a continual negotiation of the boundaries of what is means to be together in time.

Online visitors were invited to join and rejoin the livestream anytime over the course of the three days, taking us with them into their own context. Over the course of 72 hours, there were approximately 300 observers world-round, accompanying us intermittently for brief and sustained periods.


Credits:
Created & Performed by: Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum
Director of Photography: Guillaume Cailleau



Streaming: Via YoutTube to the project website: https://iii-iii-iii.org