Project name: Strings
Medium: Performance Video
Duration: 19'35''
Year: 2025
Tags: #donnaharaway #relations #communication #isolation
Credits: Ksenia Sova, Fyodor Stepanov



Presentation text:

Project Strings is an audio-visual live performance by TraumaZone art duo. The project is based on the book Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, where the author reflects on how ideas, beings, and worlds are connected together like strings in the game of Cat’s cradle. Taking the string games as the main idea, the Strings talk about the concepts of human and non-human co-existing together in a social system. As the performance moves forward, the audience sees the solid grid of connections gradually dissolving, and fluidity emerging as the core cooperation principle.

The performance consists of reactive live and prerecorded visuals, and the live sound set, that includes a 20-second loop of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a solar panel, combined with fragments of AM broadcasts recorded during an art residency in rural Bavaria.

Project Strings invites the audience into a meditative landscape where sound and visuals work together, destroying rigid structures and embracing a more fluid, interconnected modes of existence.

Biography of the authors:

TraumaZone is a live-coding duo based in Berlin, consisting of Ksenia Sova, a video artist and Fyodor Stepanov, a sound designer. Their main focus is to politicize the art community by bringing to the spotlight important questions and creating a safe space for discussion.

As a collective they try to avoid the standard musician+VJ formula and strive to achieve the organic interaction and confluence of aural and visual elements, which means, even though each of us is responsible for their part during the development stage, they don't have a clear division of tasks during our performances, but rather navigate their compositions together as a whole.

Ksenia Sova (they/them) is a media artist based in Germany. They studied media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany. They work are especially interested in exploring topics connected with alienation, isolation and anxiety of a queer body in digital environments. They use an expanded cinema approach to create time-based art-pieces for personal and group exhibitions.

Fyodor Stepanov (he/they) is a sound artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. He specialises on electro-acoustic works for interactive installations, audio-visual performances and video art. His creative output is driven by notions of transience, non-linearity, and ambiguity intrinsic to sound. The approach he has developed over the past decade combines generative algorithms with bits of radio broadcasts, field recordings, and electromagnetic listening to produce eerie acousmatic soundscapes that slowly develop over long periods of time.