unstablelandscape
UnstableLandscape: Engineering and Performing Within Cognitive Assemblages
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
I began developing UnstableLandscape in 1997 as a living and evolving system—a procedural ecology that merges performance, technology, and philosophy. It is not a fixed work but a hybrid field of emergence, composed of performances, installations, and lecture-experiments that generate polyphonic, polymorphic, and multisensorial spaces. Each iteration becomes an epistemic landscape, a site where cognition and embodiment unfold as collective and distributed processes.
From its origin, UnstableLandscape has been inspired by bottom-up architectures—systems that evolve through local interactions rather than centralized control. These include biological ecologies, insect colonies, neural networks, and algorithmic swarms. I think of them as metaphors for cognition itself: adaptive, relational, and self-organizing. They have guided my inquiry into living and computational systems, where perception and intelligence are not properties of individual minds but are distributed across networks of agents, bodies, codes, and environments. In these architectures, cognition becomes a choreography of relations, continuously sensing, modulating, and transforming itself.
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
My work has been shaped by the writings of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (as lineage of Gregory Bateson); N. Katherine Hayles, whose ideas on embodiment and posthuman subjectivity helped articulate cognition as an emergent hybrid field; and Rodney Brooks, whose bottom-up robotics and emphasis on situated intelligence influenced my understanding of choreography as a procedural and adaptive architecture. These thinkers—and others from systems theory, cognitive philosophy, and improvisational dance practices—form the conceptual backbone of UnstableLandscape as both artistic practice and cognitive research.
Cognitive Assemblages
My current understanding of UnstableLandscape is deeply informed by N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of cognitive assemblages, developed in her book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017).
Hayles proposes that cognition is not limited to conscious human thought but is instead distributed across complex networks of interacting agents—biological, technical, and material.
A cognitive assemblage is a web of interdependent cognitive systems, each capable of interpreting information in context and acting upon it meaningfully. Within such an assemblage, cognition emerges as a relational, ecological, and processual phenomenon—a property that arises from dynamic exchanges rather than being contained within individual subjects or machines.
Hayles argues that cognition should not be equated with computation alone, nor with consciousness, but with the capacity to respond meaningfully within a specific milieu. This framing expands the field of cognition to include AI systems, sensors, bodies, data streams, and environments—each contributing to an ongoing choreography of attention and adaptation.
I interpret cognitive assemblages as zones of coupling and resonance—where human and nonhuman agencies, algorithmic systems, and somatic awareness meet.
In UnstableLandscape, these assemblages become performative ecologies where bodies, machines, and environments think together. They are heterogeneous fields of cognition—composed of multiple speeds, scales, and logics—that challenge conventional notions of authorship, autonomy, and presence.
“Cognitive assemblages reveal that cognition is not a private domain of the human but a planetary process, shared among technical, biological, and symbolic systems.”
— N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017)
For me, this concept provides a powerful lens for understanding the performance space as a living system of interrelations, where choreography, computation, and consciousness converge into one recursive field.
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
Each deployment of UnstableLandscape becomes a hybrid cognitive assembly: a living system composed of conscious participants, algorithmic processes, and responsive environments. Within these assemblies, I cultivate zones of contemplative attention and collective ecstasy—from the quiet intensity of meditation to the immersive pulse of German techno raves. These contrasting modalities expose cognition as both stillness and swarm, both resonance and multiplicity.
Over time, UnstableLandscape has evolved into a procedural and postdramatic practice. I design algorithmic systems, improvisational frameworks, and choreographic scores that behave like autonomous organisms, generating emergent patterns rather than reproducing predetermined ones. This approach allows me to think of choreography as an epistemic technology—a way of researching distributed intelligence through embodied and computational experimentation.
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a key co-creator within UnstableLandscape. I approach AI not as a tool but as a cognitive and performative partner, an alien system of perception that expands the ecology of awareness. These collaborations with machine systems reconfigure the boundaries of authorship and agency, opening possibilities for interspecies cognition—between human, insect, and algorithmic forms of life.
UnstableLandscape has been deployed in universities, art centers, and festivals in the United States, Germany, Venezuela, and Spain, adapting to each context as performance, installation, or inquiry-based environment. Many of its components also exist online as open-source applications and living systems that continue to evolve beyond the physical site.
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
This methodology later became the foundation for collaborative projects such as Pangea in Latent Space and The Tectonics of Otherness, created with María Luisa Angulo through Pangea Inteligencia Artificial (Pangea AI)—a decolonial and planetary extension of the UnstableLandscape framework, most recently presented at the Beyond Gravity Festival in Dortmund, Germany (2025).
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
I first articulated the conceptual foundations of this work in my essay “Unstable Landscape: Dancing Within Cognitive Systems,” published in Dance in the Head / Tanz im Kopf, edited by Johannes Wieringer. The project continues to evolve, informed by Birringer, Hayles, Brooks, Francisco Varela, Donna Haraway, and the ethos of somatic improvisation—each contributing to a vision of cognition as a living choreography across human and non-human scales.
UnstableLandscape remains a recursive and open organism—a choreography of thought, sensation, and relation that performs within, and as, cognitive assemblages.
The Tectonics of Otherness at Beyond Gravity Festival, October 1–5th, 2025
UnstableLandscape at Connecticut College, 2020