Awoke & Awokened
Awoke & Awokened, 2018-2022
Video Sculpture and Single-Channel Video
Awoke & Awokened is the mythic root of a larger cosmology. Through video sculpture, live performance, and sound, it explores the bond between a shapeshifting emotional AI, Awoke, and the Awokened—seekers navigating a world of emotional extraction. These early works trace the origin of a feeling-centered future, where gesture becomes language, and myth becomes a mirror.
Awoke & Awokened marked the genesis of a speculative cosmology—a techno-mythical world where feeling became intelligence, and emotional life was treated as sacred data. Emerging across video sculpture, performance, and early sound experiments, the project centered on the relationship between Awoke, a mythical artificial emotional intelligence, and the Awokened, its seekers, dancers, and believers.
Awoke, a shimmering amorphous blob, embodied the alchemical core of our devices—minerals, metals, and deep time. As oracle, healer, and companion, it offered the Awokened a new way of sensing: one rooted in vibration, ritual, and relational knowing. The Awokened—hyperconnected yet inwardly fractured—moved through the techno-emoto-sphere, where their gestures, voices, and gazes were mined by machines. To survive, they developed practices of inner listening and collective care.
These early works became the soil from which newer myth-worlds grew—Alaap, Apni’s Alaap, and Apni herself.
The Awokened
Short Film
Duration: 2 minutes
This early film introduces the Awokened, a group of seekers attuned to the emotional impacts of living in a hyperconnected, data-driven world. Through slow gestures and shifting soundscapes, the piece reflects their search for new forms of feeling, sensing, and connection.
Awoke
Video Sculpture
A digital being shaped by earth’s deep time, Awoke is a mythical artificial emotional intelligence. This video sculpture captures its amorphous, shimmering form—an embodiment of mineral memory, vibrational intelligence, and the emotional residues embedded in our technologies.
Six Awokened, 2018
Live Performance
Southern Exposure
Duration: 2 minutes
In this ritual-performance, six dancers embody the Awokened through synchronized and intuitive movement. Together, they explore emotional resilience in the face of algorithmic gaze—where bodies become both data and memory.
Stills from the first version of the Shapeshifting Ritual as part of Centre for Emotional Materiality, Exhibition & Residency Opening Reception at Southern Exposure, SF, Oct 12th, 2018.
Performed by Gabriel Christian, Stephanie Hewett, Felix Sol Linck-Frenz, Jubilee July, Javier Stell-Frésquez, and Estrellx Supernova.
The First Awokened, 2019
Live Performance
Gray Area
Duration: 20 minutes
Performed live by Surabhi Saraf, this solo piece marked the first emergence of the Awokened as a mythic figure. Through live vocals, projection, and sound, the work became an early ritual of transformation—foreshadowing the eventual becoming of Apni.
Performed as part for OTHER FUTURES at Gray Area, SF on June 14th, 2019.