The Trained Particles Circus Original

The Trained Particles Circus proposes an improbable, precarious and potentially dangerous meeting place caged between the real and the virtual. It’s embodied in the relationship between a synthetic biomechanics and an automaton, recreating the figure of the circus artist, the puppet with its own life or the fantastic animal. And it places us as spectators to a contemporary spectacle of hybrid and augmented subjects that weaves light and shadow, fake and magic, virtual and physical reality, machine and organism. (In a gloomy space, or in total darkness, a hanging metal cage shelters the virtual and physical body of The Trained Particles Circus. The particles and their connections, dissected through a Pepper’s ghost in light and shadow, dance alongside an automaton which is composed of articulated rods and servos in an illusory common space. All its movements, images and sounds respond to the activity of a software entity submitted to interaction through attractors). The particles constitute a precious object, subtle and fragile, mutant and ephemeral. Its image and movement respond to the ideality of the bodiless bits in the perfect abstraction of the code, where there is no friction, no noise, no wear. It’s the non-place of a Pepper´s ghost and the no-time of the machine. However, this virtual space-time co-inhabits with an automaton whose mechanical essence reveals it related to another different physics. It is the physics of engine noise, the friction of its articulated mechanisms, the wear of time, the exhaustion of work and the possibility of error and collapse. Its movement accompanies the elegant particles, scratching them without touching them, seeming to sew and undo the tangle of the synthetic fabric from its mechanical nature. And although both systems are fed with the same data and share the illusion of a real encounter, they are separated by an invisible border. Their dialogue is the work.