Material for Solometrics
The drawing instrument, Iromatik, builds on a drawing research initiated in Solo/Dance/Authorship (HZT Berlin, 2018), including Material for Solometrics, Night of the Living-Dead Drawing, and Sissy Symmetry.
The research began with a simple question: How to Trigger my Bodytool?
I treated the body as a tool for producing situations, procedures, traces, and forms of knowledge. Rather than starting from a finished artwork, I started from the conditions that make one possible.
The research unfolded through drawing, performance, printmaking, workshops, creative coding, documentation, and self-imposed procedures. I developed a mock-methodology called XCVZ: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo. Borrowed from computer shortcuts, these operations became a way to organize artistic research. I was interested in repetition, transformation, self-organization, and the circulation of material across different forms. Drawing became the central site of investigation. Not drawing as image, but drawing as action.
I proposed three temporal modalities of drawing:
- living (the body drawing in real time),
- dead (drawing as a fixed record),
- living-dead (generative processes between authored and autonomous moments).
The body was a drawing instrument. Fingers were tools for counting, pointing, touching, drawing, erasing, assembling, and disrupting. The finger interested me not only as a body part but as a conceptual object. The digital points to the digitus. The finger counts. The finger activates systems.
The research-performance, developed in a series, brought many of these concerns together. Motion tracking, projected text, identification cards, prosthetic hands, drawing, erasing, sound, lovers, and law fragments entered into relation with one another. Rather than illustrating an idea, these elements produced situations.
The work investigated how bodies are measured, classified, documented, and recognized.
A key material was the German Transsexuals Act (TSG), the law regulating legal gender recognition in Germany at the time. Fragments of the law were projected into the performance space through a DIY tracking system attached to the body. The law became choreography. The law became material.
Questions of identification, validation, recognition, and measurement appeared throughout the research. Identification cards, archives, tracking devices, and legal documents functioned as technologies that translate lived experience into categories.
Looking back, the research was not only about drawing. Drawing was a way of studying what happens when a body passes through a system. The question was how experiences, actions, and bodies are transformed when they become representations.
What has changed since 2018: the Bodytool has become Iromatik. The drawing rules have become computational systems. But the research is still concerned with the same problem: what happens when lived experience passes through a system of representation and something does not fit.
Today, I call this moment a slip.