Distance Rituals

Dear fellow human,

In this place in time, we experience a hyper-mediation by technology for social connection. Stepping away from the screen, we ask, “What if we connect through the natureverse instead of the Internet?”

We began interfacing with nature and non-human living beings as portals for connection: embodying bodies of water, the sun, flower buds, roots. We conjured a shared placehood by moving together — asynchronously and in tandem — and formed deeper relationships with the land we were on.

We wrote these scores as a pathway for being together while we found ourselves apart. Each one began as an invitation to a sensation, feeling, or terrain found in our respective places. We speak of “places” as our environment and the space-time we dwell in, as well as the vessel of our bodies.

From 2020 to 2023 we sowed and grew these scores in the ancestral homelands of the Lenape, Pequot, Tongva, Arawak, Kānaka Maoli, and Atayal people, or places known as New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Southern California, Barbados, Hawai’i, and Taiwan.

We hope this selection of scores brings us closer — to one another, to new (and old) insights, to the Earth.

– Yidan x Yo-Yo

THE PROJECT

What if we connected through the natureverse instead of the Internet? Since 2020, we have been building strategies for connection across distance, creating openings for togetherness in a seemingly fragmented body/earth.

Arising from pandemic times of hyper-mediation by technology for social connection, we sought ways of connecting beyond the digital. Instead, we turned to older technologies, ones existing in the water, moon, wind, and sun. How do we find ways to allow the natural world to be the conduit between our disparate bodies again? How do we bring to our shared reality the fact that we are, even at a distance, part of the same web?

With Yo-Yo living in New York/Taiwan and Yidan in Philadelphia/Memphis, our entire process in itself has been a collaboration across distance. Writing movement scores with nature as our dance partner and collaging videos from our different locales, we use these practices to share embodied states remotely across time and space.

This evolved organically into an ongoing series of collaborative videos, starting with sky • body • water • fall (2020), a dual-channel video collage moving with bodies of water and the sky.

Later, the artists compiled a handful of their scores into the first edition of Distance Rituals zine, releasing the zine with Below Grand Gallery in 2023.

They now call their collaborative practice Yo-Yi. Learn more about the duo here.

sky • body • water • fall (天 • 體 • 水 • 落)

4 min / 2 channels | Official Selection: Winnepeg Underground Film Festival | Exhibited at: One Mile Gallery, Below Grand Gallery, NYU ITP

sky • body • water • fall is an invitation and meditation on presence. The dual-channel video installation piece exists both as an archive of past migration and present movement, its fluidity fluttering between the cuts of video collage and spoken scores. Arising from a moment of hyper-mediation by technology for social connection, we instead ask, “What if we connected through the natureverse instead of the Internet?” By interfacing with our bodies and nature as portals for connection, we may just find ourselves together across distance.