Object 452

The project Чули? Чули (Chuly? Chuly) translates from Ukrainian as “Have you heard it? We’ve heard it” or “Have you felt it? We’ve felt it.” It blends performative video gameplay with choreography to explore manipulative narratives and the embodiment of online personas. The project emerged from a key concept of engaging with narrative in a borderline speculative manner, critically examining the threshold where speculation turns into disinformation. The work’s core narrative draws on a story from the 1930s—a fitting decade to find parallels for the current one. The story concerns a woman who once saw giants in the deeper catacombs of a Maltese temple, the Hypogeum.

A 5,000-year-old archaeological site built by a Maltese civilization that either moved on or died out, the Hypogeum is fascinating in both its facts and its fictions. Allegedly, Lois Jessup told a story of the giants situated under the Hypogeum; an alien conspiracy magazine, The Journal of Borderland Research, documented it thirty years later (1961). Subsequently, the story became an urban legend in Malta. Moreover, a variety of channels—as well as a Netflix pseudo-archaeological mini-series—spread it, along with other tourist information. On these channels, archaeological conspiracies are known to be disseminated, frequently following the same online path as Russian disinformation drops.

Narratives can undergo specific stages of alteration to serve as a subject of disinformation. These include exaggeration, speculation, invention, contextual shifts, emotional embellishment, merging with other narratives, and, ultimately, transforming into “believable” facts. The stages outline a transformation process that highlights how speculative fiction can evolve into a tool for disinformation. Delving deeper into the narrative—its gradual mutation into its distorted version—examines the methods and stages through which narratives become modified. However, the work does not aim to explore disinformation by presenting textual comparisons between the original narrative and its mutated version; it rather intends to suggest a current experience of narratives’ constant cognitive processing.

Here, via game world exploration, the experience provides clues that the story is being questioned/altered/modified via voice-gen AI. Choosing voice-gen AI felt fitting to me, considering it being a tool for disinformation output, as well as the rise of deepfake voices and the increasingly widespread threats they pose today. The voices and the environment soundscape suggest elements which are not present in the world that Player 1 (performed by Julie-Michèle Morin) is exploring and the audience is seeing. This leaves space for interpretation by the audience: Are the voices from the past? Is it the player’s inner monologue, a memory, an NPC, or a group of witnesses who all saw a different thing, perhaps? Is the environment even what it should be when the audio pretends to be a soundscape of an environment that is not there?

These AI-generated voices embody the mutated narratives throughout the gameplay, intro, and outro sections of the work. Dramaturgical decisions drove their placement, reflecting the process of narrative mutation that prevails in modern disinformation strategies—the narrative is never complete; everyone sees or understands only fragments of the whole story. The work reinterprets the giants that Lois encounters as a number of elements—a thing in itself and a group of people that inhabit physical space—and as metaphorical entities, scaled up to the wingspan of today’s giants: planetary, interconnected, multi-node, and synchronized systems, Braidotti’s posthuman subjects (2013, 2019), merged entities of human and artificial intelligence that materialize and shapeshift. It serves as a ghost story, but the ghosts run malware in the background of our wetware, monitor the trends of our machines, infect, confuse, and destabilize the minds with their firehose of falsehoods. At least that is what the original story wants the audience to believe. The final encounter between the player and the dancer-as-avatar reaffirms the bodies behind ghostly digital personas, which have to inhabit a physical space after all.

Shifting focus, the work crafts a hybrid space that intentionally obscures the line between the live and the mediated, challenges audience perceptions, and deepens engagement. In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander (2023) discusses the impact of media technologies on live performance, noting how they blur the distinctions between live and recorded experiences. The middle part of the performance examines the entanglement of the dancer’s (Junjian Wang) physical presence with his digital avatar, pushing the performance from live, single-person, interactive performance to include physical interactions in physical and digital spaces between both agents—Player 1 and the dancer.

The dancer emerges midway through the performance, marked by a loud mocap calibration beeping sound, facing the audience during the calibration as he navigates and understands his embodiment within the virtual space. While the environment and avatar initially suggest a polished, high-resolution AAA game-like reality, the work ultimately subverts these expectations by highlighting the imperfections inherent in inertial motion capture technology. By integrating interactive motion capture animation and the suits’ susceptibility to electromagnetic and metal interference into the choreography, the projected CGI imagery becomes a gradually uncalibrated mirror image of the avatar for the dancer. Despite retaining the general body control, the dancer’s movements, altered by the suit’s miscalibration, create a visual narrative that embraces digital imperfection, viewing these uncontrollable technological responses as the disentanglement of the digital persona and its physical counterpart. This uncoupling not only emphasizes the performance’s live aspect but also enriches the potential for a failure, which additionally provides the audience with a different experience each time.

Furthermore, the project explores the audience’s reaction to errors during gameplay. In the first part, the audience observes Player 1 repeatedly failing to jump onto rocks, which elicits cheers and disappointment from the spectators. This deliberate difficulty mirrors e-sports spectatorship, where audiences actively root for their favorite teams. The imperfections become central narrative elements that reinforce the human element behind the digital persona. Auslander (2023) argues that such errors enhance authenticity, forging a tangible link between performers and viewers; they also heighten the affective experience of liveness, making the performance resonate more deeply as the audience navigates their emotional responses to these live interruptions.

To encapsulate, all performance elements—gameplay, dancer interaction, and audience response—occur both live and mediated through technology, navigating the complexities of integrating media into live performances. The work itself is played from the Edit mode in Unreal Engine. It is not packaged as an application that can be played without a human activating it (in this case, it is me, the author). A choice of such a setup further adds to the fluid, living condition of the work. The latter can only be archived as a whole project in Unreal Engine 5.2 which requires careful plug-in updates, like a living system that needs extra care in its unstable form. Consequently, this approach ensures that the performance focuses on the themes of narrative mutations while also striving to share an authentic experience and exploring the errors and embodied presence. Despite being multilayered and mediated, some features morph each time the performance is shown due to physical interference in the performance space and the presence of portable devices.

Merging technological imperfections further blends the identities of the player, performer, and NPC. In so doing, this merge weaves a complex narrative that prompts reflection on our understanding of XR embodiment, roles, identity, and digital representation, as well as how manipulative narratives craft online personas.

Voice: 11LABS

Voiced text: Julie Michele Morin

"About" text: Letta Shtohryn

Extended bibliograhy:

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