Th3_B0dy_Is_0bsOL3t3

I developed Th3_B0dy_Is_0bs0L3t3 to explore the emotional and intellectual potential of movement in conjunction with technology. To watch someone play a game, and to watch another someone perform and move. What can that do. What does that activate?

The work operates as a slow movement installation and text based interactive game. It uses fantasy, playful philosophy, and the realism of early internet culture. The text game is a homage to early 2000s games and unfolds in levels that move through the negative spaces of the internet, a third space that can rarely be accessed. The work unfolds durationally to contrast the immediacy and perceived power of technology with the slower, ambient presence of the body, where boredom, daydreaming, and moments of intensity coexist.

The game is an uncanny adventure. A roaming confusion infused text based journey that leads you to uncover something about yourself. 7 endings, all presented like a tarot card to the player. Each outcome holds a personality.

As a circus artist, I've been working with movement for over a decade, and have been recently more interested in how technology accrues weight as a form of intelligence, and how disconnected humanity has become from the body and other nuanced intelligences. The title proposes this tension. The body is obsolete? Flesh as excess?

The piece is packaged as both spectacle and anti spectacle. It examines spectatorship, how we watch each other, and frames liveness as a constructed set in which bodies, internet, surveillance, and intelligence accumulate. It is a proposition to provoke audiences.

This work does not attempt to resolve the tension between body and machine. It lingers in the instability between them, asking what forms of intelligence we privilege and what we are willing to abandon. The audience is implicated not as witness, but as participants within that exchange.

What is the purpose of flesh?
What is the purpose of flesh
What is the purpose
purpose
What
Flesh?

Uses of the Erotic, 1978 — Audre Lorde
stilluntitledproject.wordpress.com (PDF)

The Machine Stops, 1909 — E. M. Forster
cs.ucdavis.edu (PDF)

A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985 — Donna Haraway
warwick.ac.uk (PDF)

Th3_B0dy_Is_0bsOL3t3 is a physical and digital experience outside this website - it is part ambient durational performance and part audience interactive game exploring the body's power and spectatorship. The text-based game is set inside a reconstructed early-2000s chatroom and invites one audience member at a time to enter into a philosophical interactive experience, where the player is set on a quest to retrieve data they lost online. In contrast, a performer pole dances and interacts with the live environment, both happening like a collage. The work itself reflects on our relationship with physical intelligence and technology.

TBIO is a meditation in how we share space & the tension between live presence vs mediated interaction and technology.

Artist Biography

Symoné is a American-British Guinness World Record-holding queer interdisciplinary artist, director, and alternative game designer working across circus, cabaret, performance art, and game technologies. Blending pole dance, rollerskating, hula hoop, and immersive design, her work thematically explores embodied queerness, spectatorship, and the unconscious through form-driven performance. She has performed internationally, including with Nile Rodgers, Omi, and Peaches, throughout the West End, and has directed various personal productions; A Place Between Mass & Echoes, Nullspace Motel, UTOPIAN (t&cs apply) and Euphorica. Symoné studied a BA in Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies and studied game development with Code Coven Academy. Her work has been commissioned by leading UK institutions such as Cambridge Junction's Stobbs Awards, The Place, and Arts Council England, and is a previous artist-in-residence at Live Art Development Agency (2025), where she also founded the Live Art and Gaming Network.

Instagram @symoneforever · @productionsbysymone
www.symoneperformingartist.com
productions@symoneperformingartist.com

Credits

Created by Symoné
Creative Technologist - Yewen Jin
GIF Artist - Livi Wilmore
Costume Design by Unlikely Studios
Created from conversations with individual artists from Accept the Cookies Exhibition
Funded by Immersive Arts