Renee Carmichael
*Moving Difficulty part 2 - My feeling of the Blockchain is…* (series) (2020)
Video performance, audiovisual loop


*My feeling of the Blockchain is…* is a conceptual artwork created in the middle of the first hype of the NFT market, between 2020 and 2021. During lockdown, with the rapid increase in digital and virtual activities, this series was born from the idea that technical abstraction needs bodies that support it, therefore it should be possible to feel it and move within it. Based on the main concepts of the Blockchain, Renee Carmichael created a score to move and think about this technology. She began taking the difficulty number of the last transaction in her wallet and learning this huge number to say it while she danced. The achievement of this simple exercise was to give human body language and the astronomical scale of computing an oscillating point of connection, far from Boolean values. Considering performing practice as a pendulum between body and algorithm worked as a way to understand the complexity of this new phenomenon, not just in its technical dimension but also with regard to its social ecosystem, discussions, and community. Moving was the strategy to access the liminal space—between cryptography, financial abstraction, and meaning—that emerged from the Blockchain.


This research formed a dance in four parts and a DAO that explores ways to access these data narratives, in the tension between the unique subjectivity of the body and the factual nature of maths. What we hear is her human voice attempting to recall and say this impossibly large number correctly.

Today, I propose reaching for BlockHeight w/a longer and wider spine.
How does my body move through the difficulty of the blockchain?
An improvised dance in parts. Each part is linked to the difficulty of the block of the previous part in my wallet. It is an experience that feels w/abstraction, a balancing act between constructed time, abstract blocks of space, presence & technological others.
It includes a score that unravels, fragments for questioning the blockchain at the scale of the body.

Moving Difficulty Part 2

SHORT TERM MEMORIES

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Tragic Story

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The sounds of mutation have been emitted, going fast and far through syntactic, decentralized, and distributed structures. The signal was heard from the part of the world connected to the net (now 63%, increasing). Now, bodies are changing because there is no such thing as a mind: in the end, there are only bodies. When we think, we do it physically; the act of seeing or listening goes through our body; and the same happens when we try to recall, wonder or understand.


To remember our bodies and imagine their drift is an exercise that gets more dizzying and challenging as the virtual layer of experience grows. To make it sound is to create a record in some place between the mess and the order of this process of increasing abstraction, while we feel the mutation or simply get used to it.


This second part of *Sounds of Mutation* expands its proposal to various regions and focuses on the sonorous image that this wide art scene is constructing between the body and the feel of mutating. Hoping that this audio landscape and its relationship with the visual image will give us a chance to think about time with the ear.

Sounds of Mutation part 2

Six pieces as ways of thinking body drift with the ear.

Moving Difficulty Part 2

Auction

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