The Other One — Boston Series

Year

2025

Medium

Performance, biometric sensing, 3D printing

With

Elana Katz

Signal

Skin conductance (EDA), one channel

Printers

Two BambuLab P1S

Each object

Cylinder, ø 57 × 108 mm

Edition

6 × unique

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

Continued in

The Other One — Berlin Series, 2026

The Other One is a site-specific performative exhibition by HEW (House for the End of the World), and it confronts the topics of dependency, displacement and distortion through live performance, sculpture and sound installation. Joshua Fineberg's spatialized sound environment immerses viewers in a visual-sonic experience that induces a sense of disorientation. The work of Elana Katz and Dario Srbić answers with a run: two printers depend on it, it is displaced into six cylinders, and its intensity distorts the grooves that are cut into them.

On the evening of 10 October 2025 the visitors sit in the dark along the walls of the large hall of the Goethe-Institut Boston. On the parquet stands a treadmill, and between the arched windows on either side of it two 3D printers. Katz runs, with her back to the room and a sensor on her skin. Her endurance-based performance activates the space and triggers the printers, non-human performers dependent on her activation, translating her ephemeral gestures into sculptural artifacts. After ten minutes there is enough data for the first sculpture, and it is sent to a printer; after another ten minutes the second is done and sent. The run ends, and the printers go on: during the opening hours of the exhibition they print all the sculptures of the performance, and the visitors gather round a chamber in which an evening that is over is still being made. There are six.

Katz works with her body as a durational instrument, and here the action of running becomes a recording of her body. A treadmill is a machine for running without displacement: the belt goes round, and she stays where she is, facing two printers she does not get any closer to. The distance is covered on the cylinder. The groove goes round it as the belt goes round under her feet, and with every revolution it climbs, so that ten minutes of running come to 108 mm. The dependency is mutual: the printers cannot begin before she runs, and her run, of which nothing else is kept, depends on them to stay.

Nothing of the run is recorded. The sensor listens on one channel, electrodermal activity (EDA), because the goal in Boston is to capture arousal, without distinguishing whether that is fear or excitement, and what it registers (arousal, exertion, duration, waves) is truly ephemeral: there is no recording and no interface for recording. The signal passes through Visceral Cuts, Dario's framework, and becomes a 3D model, and the model is sent to a printer. The run is displaced, out of the body and into matter, out of the evening and into the days after it. The recording of her body is the cylinder.

Each cylinder is a holder, a record of an inner state deduced from biometric signals, as Edison's cylinders held music, only that it does not have to hold it linearly. It has Edison's size, 57 mm across and 108 mm high, and like any record it holds a certain time: ten minutes. The duration of the performance is not known. When ten minutes are full, another cylinder is started (who is the cylinder to say that the performance is over?).

The groove is a spiral, with all the parameters of the spiral of a vinyl record, and each surge of electrodermal activity adds another revolution to it, creating what could be understood as phonographic records of embodied experience. The cuts are marks, and not the deep cuts of Hegelian thesis and antithesis. Intensity distorts the groove: low intensity stretches it in width and expands the pitch of the spiral, with low depth; high intensity shortens it, deepens the cut and lowers the pitch, the spirals compressing in intensity, towards a singularity at infinite arousal, where the groove would stop climbing and cut through the cylinder on the spot: a groove on a treadmill.

These cylinders don't capture time as frozen moments but physically accumulate it as continuous topography. The durational arc of performance transforms into tangible artifacts where past and present coexist in the same sculptural surface. The inner workings of Katz's body are transferred to a physical print, a historical map manifested during this committed performative action. The map might be playable when Dario designs the player. His practice explores such translations between organic and computational systems, treating data not as abstraction but as material force capable of generating new forms of embodied knowledge.