ALL THAT YOU TOUCH YOU CHANGE

2021-22

Created in collaboration with Renee Carmichael.

All that you touch You Change is a collaborative video performance developed during the COVID-19 pandemic through the Art Research Ecology (ARE) Match-Making project. Working remotely between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Maui, Hawaiʻi, Renee Carmichael and WhiteFeather Hunter brought together performance, microbiology, movement improvisation, and bioinformatics to investigate how creative practice can persist through technological mediation, distance, and uncertainty.

Meeting through Zoom, the artists recorded a series of improvised exchanges that responded to one another's methods, gestures, and experiments. These recordings were subsequently edited independently by each artist using an exquisite corpse methodology, allowing each work to evolve through acts of interpretation, interruption, and unexpected transformation. Rather than seeking seamless collaboration, the process embraced contingency, producing artworks shaped as much by digital glitches, algorithmic errors, and unstable connections as by deliberate artistic intention.

Borrowing its title from Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler), All that you touch You Change understands collaboration as a reciprocal process of mutual transformation. Biological protocols intersect with performance and computational systems, while embodied movement resists the technological instrumentalization of the body. Scientific experimentation, improvisation, and DIY methodologies become intertwined as ways of navigating the unpredictability of pandemic life.

The resulting video performances demonstrate vulnerability, adaptation, and relationality, working with technological mediation as an active participant in the work and opening space for new forms of intimacy, resistance, and creative exchange between human and non-human systems.

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Set of dual channel video performance(s) with audio, [00:10:21] & [00:09:20]. B-sides video also available.

The work has been shown at the Cullity Gallery, UWA School of Design, Perth, Australia, as well as online through the ARE Network events. Read more on the ARE website here: https://are-research.com/archive/match-making-january-2022/