A vast mass of glass, steel, and synthetic amalgams – you are walking through the city scape, where the horizon is swallowed by towers reaching into the smoggy sky. The year is 2064, and Earth’s axis has shifted again. A subtle tremor passes beneath your feet as you step off the levitating walkway, and you enter the dense labyrinth of ground-level streets. The strobo goggles hug your face like a second skin. They display a glitching constellation of lines and data over your human vision, they open a complex network that you can decipher after years of dedicated training. HyperStrobo goggles, yes. Next level eye-trackers so to speak, which started to develop in the beginning of the 21st century. These ones expose the planetary shifts in real time, and let you see the patterns in the urban flow. The hidden fractures and relations in time-space-movement.
You remember San Francisco, 2029. The first time it happened. There was the clamor of sirens and honking cars, the distant hum of construction, drilling. You were walking down 42nd Street when suddenly your body refused to follow the logic of the crosswalk. Your feet shifted, turned, pulled to a sensation, kind of a vibration in the air that you could perceive. You remember how you angled your body to meet that invisible force, feeling the pull between the weight of your step and the void beneath your feet. It was in that moment you understood how the city was in flux. And so were you. Bumping on the plywood wall by the construction guild. Yellow traffic sign, remember? Taste of diluting banana yoghurt in your mouth…
… And you, you are the choreographic body, caught in the middle, spoffing your way through it all.
spof is an ongoing urban choreoreading exploration, which focuses on the concept ‘single point of failure’ (spof). The term refers in system theory to a potential risk posed by a flaw in the design, implementation or configuration of a circuit or system. Here Kellokumpu interpretes it more loosely as a flaw in a choreographic body – the body’s ability to recognize its motional surrounding circumstance and changes in the materiality of it. This flaw causes spoffing and the formation of spof. Instead of the remaining grounded on Earth, during spoffing, the body responds to the cosmic alignments and movements. During daily walks in San Francisco, Busan, Tokyo, Paris, Athens, and Helsinki, Kellokumpu spoffed. The exhibited work presents these six moments of urban vertical walking-through, which launch a relation to the rotational axis of the planet Earth, approximately 23,5°. The entire project is an experiment that overlaps urban and cosmic scales, choreographing and choreoreading, exploring the interplay between place, space, and choreographic body.
SIMO KELLOKUMPU 