Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch, 2025
Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch, 2025Performance, MiTu Theater, Brooklyn, NY
A mixed-reality performance that explores the sensorial and emotional experience of scrolling. It is a dance of scrolling thumbs—thumbs attached to hands performed by whole people. Through movement, sound, and absurdist costuming, props, and embodied exploration, the piece investigates how our bodies are disciplined by digital systems and how the intimate act of touch becomes flattened into functionality. This work asks: how do we touch a digital body? And can touch rehumanize the dehumanized scroll?
The development of this work was supported by MAX Media Arts Exploration and the MAXmachina Laboratory.
----- New 2026 Iteration -----
This new iteration of Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch expands the original two-performer work into an experimental musical/opera for 4–6 performers. While the original focused on an intimate dialogue between two individuals and their thumbs, this version grows into a larger ensemble piece centered on group choreography, large-scale puppetry, live audiovisual performance, voice, and musical accompaniment.
The performers create complex choreographies with their hands and phones, with visuals synchronized across multiple screens. Drawing from my 15-channel phone video work from 2021 (excerpt included below), the piece creates a live multi-screen environment where bodies and devices move together. The performance unfolds through a series of absurd shifts in scale: asking what it means to feel embodied in the digital, performers move from human scale to oversized hands and eventually giant thumbs that “scroll” across one another’s bodies, before returning to the intimate scale of individual touch.
The live music and sonic landscape mirror this constant shifting, moving across genres, moods, and tempos to reflect the fractured emotional and sensory experience of being online. The composition is structured using the logic of an algorithmic score, where repetition, interruption, acceleration, and unpredictability become the framework for the work’s rhythm and form.
At its core, the piece explores digital sociality and touch: how our phones shape the ways we connect, communicate, and experience intimacy. It asks a simple but strange question: how do you feel a scroll? What does touch become when it is mediated through a screen? Through music, movement, and immersive media, the work examines how digital technologies reshape our sense of connection, attention, and embodiment.
----- Previous Projects -----
Emergent Technologies, 2021
15-channel interactive video essay played on cellphones
Indicators Workshop, 2017
The Eyes, 2022