Repeat as necessary #03 - Stillness is an ancient secret
Repeat as necessary #03 - Stillness is an ancient secret
Operator's Repeat as necessary (2025) is a collection of 40 unique artworks, each representing a precise moment in the 27-minute performance of the same name, which premiered in Bodrum, Türkiye. The collection uses a custom notation system to show dancer movements, breathing patterns, sound frequencies, and nervous system states.
Building on Operator's on-chain choreography method developed in 2023 for Human Unreadable, the works are rendered entirely from the Ethereum blockchain with underlying motion data, making choreography collectable as unique art objects rather than as documentation and notation alone.
Spanning four distinct visual chapters, the works combine computer-generated elements with hand-drawn marks, creating a hybrid visual language, as though experimental music notation met concrete poetry. Each work features dots representing seven dancers, arrows showing movement flow, chapter-specific breathing symbols, and aphoristic statements.
Through neurologically-tuned smart contract mechanics, the collection achieves collective resonance, embodying the same transcendent dissolution of boundaries that defines the original performance.
The notation legend, underlying motion data, video references, and performance provenance exist within Repeat as necessary's Performance Operating System, enabling the public and collectors to read the scores and traverse the complete performance architecture.
Explore the Repeat as necessary Performance Operating System at operator.la/repeat-as-necessary
About the performance:
In Repeat as necessary, the performance, choreography is an instruction manual for forgotten circuitry, ancient patterns inscribed in the flesh. Rather than considering technology as something outside ourselves, this work recognizes the body as a formidable instance of technology.
Through repetitive movement something begins to dissolve: the boundaries between here and elsewhere, self and other, audience and performer, boredom and revelation. The rhythmic architectures of sacred chant and Sufi sema music, rooted in neural entrainment through repetition, breath, and modal tension, are reimagined not as doctrine, but as sonic architectures for nervous system attunement.
Woven together, movement, sound, costume design, form a hybrid ritual system: pulse and posture, fabric and form, guiding the body toward trance not through belief, but through sensation. What emerges beyond the terror of staying still is an archaeology of presence, the body's hidden protocols activated: mirror neuron networks, autonomic regulation, collective neural entrainment. Repeat as necessary is an experience as well as an activation/honoring of the technology of the body itself.
In other words: become worse at being elsewhere.