Directed and Produced by Boo Chapple
Designer: Arianna Wilson
Choreographer: Nic Hempel
Performers: Cheryl Wheatley and Nic Hempel
Sound and Video: Boo Chapple
Photographs: Takeshi Miyamoto

'How to turn you solar plexus into a terrorist' was a performance installation in the Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2004. A growth of information installed deep within the city. An int-erruption in the changing topology of life, a sensual and chaotic event.

Just as our space is increasingly occupied by data, so too is the body increasingly conceived in terms of its informational content. We occupy a nexus between an apparently finite physical existence and an apparently infinite virtual existence. The nexus between skin and the full air, data space and body space, sense and sensuality.

The city, with its pumping heart and arterial roads, has been concantenated metaphorically with the human body since the Renaissance. In this schema the laneway is a zone of excretion and absorption, a space at once interior and marginal. Similarly, biometric data is at once internal to the body yet removed, used to signify outside, to create the boundaries between self and other, terrorist and nation state. The body of the nation state, the cancerous growth of insurgence; it is internal yet other, immortal and hence informationally infinite, chaotic and hence outside the realms of sense.

'How to turn your solar plexus into a terrorist' used wireless camera technology to manifest the relationship between body space and information space both sonically and visually. Both performers wore wirelss cameras as they moved within the scaffold structure installed in Corrs Lane. Video and audio transmitted were output to the five television monitors suspended in the structure. The cameras were set to transmit on the same frequency thus creating a moving collage of superimposition and interference. Performer surveilling performer, elided with images of claustrophobic urban space and interference sidebands scrolling across the screen. The audio would pick up on the occasional conversation, ghostly voices merging in and out of the data hiss and feedback scream as the performers moved within the densely electric space.