Concert / Performance
Cybernetic Entanglements
Viola Yip / Ken Ueno
Viola Yip and Ken Ueno © David Beecroft
Cybernetic Entanglements is a new work built around a new wearable musical instrument shared and performed by Ken Ueno and Viola Yip. The instrument is neither costume nor prosthesis, but an operative component of a cybernetic circuit in which the performers’ bodies function as part of the machine itself. Rather than treating technology as an extension of the body, the work presents a dynamic and permeable relationship in which body and machine continuously co-constitute one another.
Cybernetic Entanglements foregrounds the singularity of each performer’s body – shaped by distinct backgrounds, genders, and life trajectories. Difference is not symbolic but materially operative: it conditions how sensing occurs, how signals propagate, and how sound unfolds in time. In doing so, the work reframes embodiment as an active compositional force. Situated within the framework of technodiversity, the piece articulates a cosmotechnics of embodiment: the circuit itself operates as a situated cosmology of relation, difference, and becoming, proposing an alternative vision of contemporary music-making in which technology does not erase difference, but amplifies relational complexity and cultivates new forms of sonic, corporeal, and cultural interdependence.