The Other One

Years

2025–2026

Medium

Performance, biometric sensing, generative 3D printing, spatialised sound

Dimensions

Each cylinder ø 57 mm — the diameter of Edison’s standard phonograph cylinder

With

Elana Katz — performance, concept, curation
Joshua Fineberg — composition, spatialised sound
David Bollwerk — production management

Exhibited

The Other One — Boston, Goethe-Institut Boston, October 2025
The Other One — Berlin, Galerie KWADRAT, 14 March – 11 April 2026

Supported by

Goethe-Institut International Coproduction Fund; coproduced with Galerie KWADRAT, Boston University College of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Art Triennial

A performance is measured while it happens, and a sculpture is made out of the measurement. Elana Katz performs to exhaustion; sensors on her body return skin conductance, heartbeat, muscle and — in Berlin — cortical signal; the signal is analysed, mapped, and printed as a cylinder that grows in the room for as long as she is working. Joshua Fineberg’s spatialised sound fills the space the two of them are working in. What is left at the end is not a document of the performance. It is a second body, related to the first by a series of chosen losses.

Body to signal, signal to code, code to matter. Three displacements, and none of them is free: each transduction discards something the previous stage held and gains something the previous stage could not carry. The cylinders’ surface texture is that arithmetic made visible — the grain of what survived the translation and what did not. This is the work’s actual subject. Not the body, not the machine, but the passage between them.

The object that results is a cylinder 57 mm across, carrying a spiral groove — the diameter of Edison’s standard phonograph cylinder, and the quotation is deliberate. Edison’s wax held a voice by cutting it into a spiral; these hold a nervous system by the same geometry, and wait, as those did, for a machine that could play them back.

The printer is a performer, not an output device. It cannot begin until she begins, it cannot continue if she stops, and it does not know what it is making. Dependency runs in one direction and the machine is on the receiving end of it.

The room sets the vocabulary

The two showings are not iterations of one piece. Each room earned its own instrumentation, and the number of channels measured was decided by what the room could hold rather than by what the apparatus could do.

Boston — Goethe-Institut, October 2025. Katz ran on a treadmill in a large institutional hall. Running produces arousal that does not need to be told apart: effort, heat and nerves arrive together and read honestly as one rise. The work measured a single channel — skin conductance — because a large room flattens distinctions, and measuring four would have over-articulated what the performance was doing. Fabricated on a BambuLab P1S.

Berlin — Galerie KWADRAT, from March 2026. Katz climbed a ladder that passes through the ceiling. Climbing fear is not one thing: it can be fear, focus, or triumph, and the performance is about telling those apart. The room is small enough to hold the distinction, so this showing earned four channels — skin conductance, heart, muscle and brain. Fabricated on a BambuLab H2D. One sculpture materialised completely over the course of the opening evening, with the audience watching the pipeline’s live monitor as it went.

Why four, and not one

Skin conductance measures how much, never which. Fear and excitement raise it identically — the same steep onset, the same elevated baseline, the same crowd of small responses — so a single channel can report that something is happening in a body and can never report what. Boston did not need more than that. Berlin is built on the difference.

Fear is not a quantity but a position, and locating it takes at least four axes. Skin conductance carries the sympathetic surge, and its complexity carries the first clue: under fear the range of states a body moves through narrows, where curiosity widens it. The heart supplies what the skin cannot — the parasympathetic side, which withdraws under fear and holds under excitement, so that arousal with vagal collapse is one thing and arousal without it is another. Muscle carries the bracing, a sustained tension that excitement does not produce. And the cortical channel is the only one that gives direction: turning toward, or turning away.

Each axis drives one dimension of the groove, so the emotion is not classified and then illustrated — it is inscribed as geometry and stays undecided in the object. Depth follows the balance between the two nervous systems, width follows complexity, pitch follows direction, height follows bracing. A frightened passage runs deep, narrow, tightly wound and raised; an excited one runs shallow, wide, open and flush. You can find the difference with a fingertip before you can name it.

Apparatus

Biometric acquisition at 1000 Hz (BITalino with ScientISST); phasic and tonic decomposition, heart-rate variability, multifractal analysis; a three-regime figural mapping from signal to form; slicing and fabrication driven from a Raspberry Pi that runs everything unattended in the gallery. The software is written for this work — a C++ pipeline called Visceral Cuts, built and maintained by the artist rather than assembled from tools.