Чули ? Чули / Chuly Chuly
Letta Shtohryn, University of Malta enrolled in PhD in Digital Arts MAKS faculty
Artwork Description:
Чули? Чули / Chuly? Chuly (2024) is a live video game and motion capture dance performance staged in two acts through an Unreal Engine environment running in Play In Editor mode. In Ukrainian the verb чути / chuty means to hear, feel, or sense. Read as both question and answer, Have you heard? We have heard, Have you felt it? We have felt it, the title frames hearing, feeling, sensing as equal sources of knowledge. The work begins with a story of a giant sighting and treats the giant as a figure of scale, a system perceived through rumours, traces, and partial evidence. This story is transformed through LLM-generated text and synthetic voices, using repetition, contradiction, false certainty, emotional amplification and source confusion. Player 1 moves through a world guided by misleading AI narration, where authority is produced through circulation rather than evidence. The performance extends this narrative instability to digital embodiment. A dancer’s body is captured live through inertial motion capture and translated into an avatar. Drift, magnetic interference, delayed response, and calibration instability become choreographic guideline. Glitch exposes the fragile connection between performer, avatar, sensor system, game engine, and audience. As Player 1 and the dancer swap roles, control splits between body and gaze. The avatar becomes a contested body shared by performer, player, and system, blurring the line between human, avatar, NPC. The work depends on live presence, participation, and technological instability to reveal how digital systems shape behaviour, identity, and power.
Project Collaborators:
Voice narration: Emma Beard (UK) Sound: Junjian Wang (AT), Letta Shtohryn (UA) 3D models of life forms, rocks and meteorites: Natural History Museum Vienna Linz team : Player, performer, dramaturg: Julie-Michele Morin (CA) Choreography, dance: Junjian Wang (AT) Brussels team: Choreography, dance : Marion Bosetti (BE), Dora Almeleh (BE) Player 1 : Shelbatra Jashari (BE) Conceptualisation, prototype – IT:U x Ars Electronica FOUNDING LAB Dramaturgy, completion – Realities in Transition residency at iMaL Brussels Co-production : iMaL Art Centre, Brussels (BE)
