Excerpt of the play:

"In 2033, the art world has gone through a severe transformation. Now we could track everything. No emotional labor went unrecognized as it gets registered on the blockchain; and every relation, every idea, every gesture, can be archived and turned into an asset (often called a community). 

We perfected the art of turning our work - and ourselves - into NFTs. We were banking on performances, just as other people were banking on words or attention. 

Some people became really good at it; too good actually. They extended the curse of self-ownership like few libertarians would ever dream of. They became replicas in the metaverse: lost souls, or rather, lost bodies. Around them, the future felt useless, and so damn expensive. They were talking about having skin in the game, but they actually couldn’t feel the play anymore. 

The precarity of our flesh became an urgent matter. The question became: 

How do we get our bodies back? 

Throughout these three days, we explored the Sphere’s relationscape. We went haptic. We made ourselves porous to our surroundings. We ignited hybrid zones of trust, being held, dragged and sometimes thrown onto handcrafted and nested Anarchive pillows.

We manipulated gravity in small groups, moved in and out of comfort, cruised our VR space IRL. We meditated ourselves through sediments of the earth and tapped into the air’s storage devices. There, we eventually found a portal to land and integrate the knowledge that was always already there. We found ourselves right amidst The Sphere, where the digital soul waited patiently for us to leave behind our good old patterns of individualistic artistic ambition. And we became seers of the unforeseen, fugitive dreamers of the afterlife of live art.  

We accessed together, with our bodies and in shared balance, the space where live memory is archived and anarchived - where traces of events are preserved in their living potentiality. These traces in the Sphere are manifold. They register in the (blockchain-based) digital soul as data, validating the occurrence of an event of the past. But they are also plotted into something like the riddle of documented life. As we strive to account for what we have become, something exceeds. Our experiences escape from our own grasp. You can only get a hold on them as long as you pass them on. 

We are now, back in 2022, at the end of what Legacy Russel calls “the singular body as a legible subject”. This was a wild and speculative ride, as we moved and got moved, adding a line of ledger into the knowledger here, marveling at the care irradiating between a performer and a character and an improvisation there; gently contracting fleeting visions into propositional fragments, and also, as if we were preparing time-capsules for (our) future AI-assisted selves, some preliminary instructions for running and curating them –  

so, for the time being – We Draw a Magic Circle and Grow at the Speed of Trust"