Olga Kisseleva

Dancing Data is part of EDEN (Ethics, Durability, Ecology, Nature), a project on how trees communicate that Kisseleva has developed since 2012 and that received the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize in 2020. Its aim is a new form of choreographic writing, which she calls ‘choreography by the living.’ Biological signals emitted by trees are captured and translated into choreographic and musical notation, so that dance becomes a form of writing co-produced by living organisms and technical devices. First developed during a residency at Artspace in Sydney, with partners including the MARCS Institute and the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, the project draws on ideas by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway to reveal a shared agency across plants, people and machines. At the same time, Kisseleva insists that the trees’ biological otherness remains irreducible to computation, raising questions about our ethical responsibility towards the living beings we collaborate with. The work shown here was created in situ in the endemic Mare Longue forest on Réunion Island.