Inner Emigration

Inner Emigration is a multimedia performance about the new state of queer bodies and sensuality in an algorithmic space. Communication protocols, interfaces, and devices change the way how people exist quietly. A cyborg nowadays is not a creature made of flesh and machine. It is something that mediated through relationships with digital objects. Hypertext narrative, augmented reality and multichannel video are used in this project to describe a disembodied senses of the relationship between human bodies in post-digital world.

The project tries to reveal a state of queer sensuality in a world where privacy and intimacy are under influence of protocols and interfaces. In this world, a division between real and virtual does not longer exist. Nowadays a swipe of a finger on a flat screen is almost as natural as a touch of our skin. Phantom-Vibrations-Syndrome is another example. It is a feeling of vibration when there is no vibration, it is a hallucination. It seems that when a person interacts with digital objects they become a cyborg, but not as a creature made of flesh and machine. This cyborg exists through interfaces and algorithms.

Katherine Hayles, an American electronic literature researcher, describes a cyborg as a being that can tear down or complicate traditional boundaries. The definition of a cyborg as a conceptual, not technological creature, is more reasonable. Then we have to find out how human relationship exists in this new state.

We have to talk about the new state of queer bodies, their sensuality and corporeality through AI algorithms, data protocols and new interfaces. These topics have separate academic researches, but together they are our everyday experience. Only our personal experience and sensuality let us understand our state in today's world. An attempt to describe only the technological part of it increases the gap between us and digital development.