CliMax

Interactive performance
Creation 2018

Hortense Gauthier : body, sounds
Antoine Schmitt : images, programs

Interactive performance between a human female and an artificial creature programmed for pleasure
mixing body, image and sound (25 minutes)

CliMax is a performance which shows the transbiological encounter between a human female and an artificial creature of pixels and sound, programmed to feel pleasure at the contact of the other. In mutual ecstasy, these two organisms, one immaterial and one of flesh, inspire each other in an orgasmic spiral to explore the movements and intensities of pleasure beyond the binarities and biological categories. In an experience of mutual possession, where erotic flows of the body, telluric breaths and generative vitality of the machine intermix, what are the circulations of the power of desire ? Can a body make a creature of pixels come to climax ?

CliMax is the central artwork of a matrix of research and creation which explores the relationships of humans with a creature programmed to (really) feel pleasure, and which includes performances, long or intense, videos, audio creations, workshops, etc.. In these artworks, where pleasure is considered a fundamental universal force animating living beings, whether human or non-human (animals, plants and digital), a wide sensorial dynamics is unfolded between two forms of life, and draws us to question the deep mechanisms of the body in movement as well as our own programming as “natural” living beings.

By creating a sensitive relationship between a human and a programmed creature, this creation matrix is a reflexion on the pleasure of the body and its representations which proposes an alternative to Artificial Intelligence, that is the possibility of a relational intelligence. CliMax envisions pleasure as an access path to alterity, as a vector of overcoming identities, and thus opens the doors of perception and deep comprehension of the world and of the other.

Related artworks:
– ExoLove, performed installation, in interaction with the public.
– ExoLove Encounter, installation for the audience

photo : Nadia Rabhi