Academy

Hen/i

HIDA Fellow

Hen/i is a creative director with a background in dance, choreography, and intermedia arts. She is a co-founder of four performance collectives including Stratofyzika, a collective that creates mind-altering performance experiences through a hybrid of new media, dance theater, and spatial soundscapes inspired by the findings of computer science, technology, the natural sciences, data protection and man/machine boundaries.
In the project she shifts her choreographic thinking from the detached, aesthetic and conceptual presentation to an embodied, for-the-people, post-capitalist imagination. Her main focus is between the digital (adapting speculative narratives and social art practices for a digital simulation) and the physical world (bridging climate science to the people and creating a choreography for “debugging” and “cooling down”) together with physically cooling spaces after research of materials and their lifecycles.

In their research project “Disco Earth”, Do Mayer and Hen/i are looking for methods of cooling. If one were to reflect sun rays back into space using simple mirrors, how many m² of mirror surface would be needed to achieve a significant global cooling effect? Can mirrors and artistic/technical ingenuity be combined to create public land art? And what counterpart would such an approach have in the cultural and social spheres? To get closer to answers to these questions, Do and Hen/i are exploring forms of digital modeling of futures and researching public places and methods of social cooling.

The goal is to make applied climate research tangible through a mix of digital simulation and transdisciplinary experimentation. The essential elements are a computer game-like simulation that traces the physical data of climate change in a virtual world, and a social performance that gives shape to the psychological aspects of human responses to climate change. Coming together at the end: A performative installation that brings together digital simulation and social experimentation in a reflective "cooling station" in a public space. With an accompanying choreography that makes visible the changing relationship of nature/humanity to let a possible future become DISCO EARTH by means of performance, visual effects and music.

https://stratofyzika.com/blog