Joana Chicau

Joana Chicau [PT/NL] is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. In her practice she researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

Performing

WebChoreographies

The web can be seen as a choreographic agglomerate which defines ways of moving collectively and individually, through fluid and complex landscapes of information displays, networked, multimedia environments.

< A WebPage in Three Acts > is an assemblage of live coded visual experiments performed in the web browser. The computer screen is divided in two stages: the ‘frontstage’, the interface a user normally accesses and the ‘backstage’ or the web console in which programming languages can be run. In the web console Joana Chicau calls, juxtaposes and manipulates different web programming actions which are named after choreographic concepts. The page originally filled with information, will be deconstructed, with elements being set in motion, displaying a varied composition of graphic elements in the screen. The performance structure is divided in three acts, and comprehends physical movement.

Online environments - with all of its properties, designed intentions and ideologies - become an experimental stage for bringing into shared consciousness the physicality of code & the corporeality of the machine.

This performance in part of an on going research on how design and web based computational systems can be used to construct new scenarios, imaginaries and hypothesis guided by choreographic concepts. Privileging open source tools and investigation through feminist lens, Joana Chicau combines real-time algorithmic composition & movement studies to rethink the vocabularies, protocols, modes of participation and different conditions for affective interfacing of bodies and technologies.

Additional information