ARCOS’ interactive media installation, Potential Future Pasts, serves as a staged rehearsal of possible cyborg realities. Audience-participants use their bodies to assert their agency as humans entangled within a digital system: to embrace their cyborgian reality, they must experiment with physicality and virtuality.
A smartphone on a tripod captures a projection of its camera’s video livestream, which is several seconds delayed from the present moment, pointing to how the physical limitations of our technologies can distort our perception of time. The result is an audiovisual layering of multiple looping time frames in which actions are documented and available for review, always in the context of moments that came before and (virtually) to follow. As the loops repeat and recede, they also decay and distort, mirroring the process neuroscientists believe takes place with human memories that are colored or changed by the act of remembering. This audiovisual breakdown is caused by the process of feeding the imperfectly reproduced video signal back onto itself, amplified by the differences in the smartphone’s perception of actual versus reproduced objects. Perceiving time differently in this way invites them to question the experience of time in daily life.
EG Gionfriddo and Eliot Gray Fisher co-direct ARCOS, a multi/trans/inter/anti-disciplinary group using dance and technology to imagine new possible futures. They primarily create via a method of hacking, or repurposing everyday technologies into performance, to inspire others to become more regular hackers of the systems in our world. They hold an expansive understanding of technology that includes language, movement systems, and identity construction, as well as our material devices and the less visible network infrastructures that they access. They understand our bodies as highly intelligent, already hybrid, and existing in multiple spaces in nonlinear time. They consider their process and performance projects as rehearsals for survival in an increasingly complex world; growing our capacity to hold that complexity in ourselves and with each other.
ARCOS offers arts training, development, and service programming rooted in the slow, insistent work of imagining a more equitable future. Their programs provide multiple paths towards changework, from the deeply personal to widely relational. These programs take the shape of weekly class series, workshops, academic residencies, microgrants, and production mentorship for independent performing artists. ARCOS understands their work to be a relational, rather than transactional, practice of sharing resources, knowledge, and care.
Website: arcosdance.com
Instagram: @arcosdance
See the May 30–June 28, 2025 Exhibitions Press Release here.