Flood

Flood is a performance that explores the body as a transductive system through the coupling of hair, skin, and unstable vocal synthesis. The work presents a wearable interface in which long blonde hair, reconfigured with metallic pins, forms a dense fibrous network that operates as a sonic surface. Within this system, hair decentralises the mouth as the primary site of vocal production and repositions the body as a distributed speaking structure through tactile engagement.
Sound emerges through continuous tactile interaction between the performer’s skin and the hair. Variations in pressure, duration, and movement directly trigger and modulate voice-like timbres through formant-based synthesis. These sounds do not stabilise into language. Instead, they presented as fragmented murmurs, repetitions, and unstable oscillations. Voice no longer functions as a carrier of meaning but exposes its material condition, echoing the tension within the reconfigured hair structure.
The work draws on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora to situate sound within a pre-linguistic, affective, and fluid field where meaning has not yet formed. This condition is entangled with the monstrous feminine as articulated by Barbara Creed, where the body becomes a site of both desire and abjection. Hair, historically shaped by aesthetic control and fetishisation, intensifies this tension by disrupting how desire is projected onto the body.
At the same time, the work engages Donna Haraway’s posthuman perspective by treating hair as a prosthetic extension that blurs the boundary of the body. Through this configuration, the performer does not control sound as an external output but participates in a process in which body, material, and perception continuously influence and destabilise one another.