Improvising Presence
- Nabuurs&VanDoorn
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
When human and algorithm collide to co-compose urban memory, place, and performance.
Protocols are not fixed instructions but living frameworks for interpretation and reflection. They function as scores for improvisation, where gesture, sound, and mapping intertwine. In this approach, the map becomes both document and script, a tool through which we renegotiate memory, belief, and place.
We work through proxies: intermediaries acting on behalf of another, whether person or computer, linking original and network. Our materialized protocols operate as instruction-based scores, where movement, voice, recording, sound, and chance intersect, a performative cartography tracing our presence in the city.
The old modern maps are constructed belief-systems, remembering and re-enacting power.
The Living Atlas functions as an algorithm: a set of rules proxies follow during improvisational plays, re-enacting presence across urban situations.
In contexts of migration, postcolonial memory, and spatial politics, digital algorithms do more than index behaviour; they choreograph it. In today’s media-saturated spaces, presence is shaped as much by networked code as by human intent. This resonates with our experimental, artist-led plays, where research becomes a score for action; a feedback system between bodies, cameras, interfaces, and proximity. Our materialized protocols exist in this tension: the algorithm is neither hidden nor abstract but performed, enacted, and made tangible.
Proxies expand the protocol: from rule to relation, system to score, order to meeting. The protocol becomes a living medium. A tool to navigate uncertainty, authorship, and collective experience. Improvising presence, The Living Atlas situates audiences within layered realities of memory, place, and performance, where human and algorithm collide, co-compose, and unfold together.
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