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My performance work is concerned with the range of possibilities between gestures of control and gestures of excess in the navigation and presentation of partially automated digital systems. I construct systems of performance in which the gestures communicative function has been altered or interrupted by its inability to control the system effectively. In essence the gestures slide between states of utility and idiosyncrasy. Sometimes in my work there is a very direct and succinct cause and effect of a sound and its source, but mostly it is a wayward path. What agents of the live situation influence the network? Is it the audience, the performer or the instruments that are played? In some cases, the gestures have nothing at all to do with the sound, obviously disconnected as an independent agent in the performance. As the machine runs its program and the body asserts its need to move, the solo becomes a disabled duet layering disparate muses together in an awkward dance.

If sound generation no longer requires a live presence, what are the 'controlling agents'? Are they already present in 'an electronic system' or is this the system that the performer/technician devises and then interacts with? Why move at all when systems seem to play themselves? I deploy sonic networks that disrupt my habits of gesture rather than rely on the function of the gesture to manipulate the instrument. For instance, by using a program that simulates Alvin Lucier's 'I am sitting in a room' and a series of texts that correspond to different movement sequences a structure of call and response is created. As the text dissipates into its resonant reiteration I perform the movement that the text calls for. The movements cannot be memorized in sequence. In order to provoke me to listen for the cue, which is gradually being transformed into the timbre of the room, the recorded material is randomly reorganized for playback. In the end, the two components of the performance go their separate ways; the machine sniffs out the dominant resonance of the room while I'm left imagining which movement is supposed to be performed.

Movement is practice. Some movements are imitations of other performers that I've seen both live and mediated. Often they are incomplete images of the sensation of moving in a particular fashion in time through space. The movements are attempts to elicit a subjective state of being or portray an emotive misplacement, a verification of the nervous system responding to an emotional state that is unclear, inarticulate, but that still needs to be communicated. Some are drawn from my childhood experience of watching my father's disabled students express their needs via any means available to them, regardless of its effective attachment to the nervous system. At the school for the developmentally disabled the odd and sometimes violent looking gesture was accepted and listened to. The ability of the body to control and communicate meaningful relationships between the performer, audience, instrument, space and time is effectively inhibited by shifting control networks employed by programmatic digital systems in a live performance. The gesture has misplaced its usefulness.