For Jen Torrence
The core inquiries of this piece have been circling for quite some time, tracing back to my first reading of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which Jen prompted during our first conversation back in 2017.
The questions and provocations that emerged after reading Cyborg Manifesto have since been an ongoing thread in my artistic practice, spawning a number of musical and non-musical creative offshoots.
When Jen and I reconnected at Darmstadt in 2023, I shared with Jen just how influential our 2017 talk about Haraway’s writing had been and asked whether we might create a piece together—one that explored threads of Haraway’s Manifesto,
particularly–gender, queerness, posthumanism, and the electronic extension and mediation of the body. In doing so, I was curious about how we could continue challenging binaristic thinking and further theorize the cyborg as a way to rei
magine identity as fluid, partial, and constructed—not fixed or essential, and inherently mediated by the technological world.
Drawing on Jen’s singular practice—at the intersection of percussion, physical theater, collaborative composition, and a deep engagement with queer theory—the piece unfolds within an activated landscape where the lines between
body and machine constantly blur, creating a kind of cyborgian entanglement. The drum set functions as a quasi-feedback machine, with Jen’s body acting as a live filter—shaping, distorting, and mediating the oscillations between
microphones and speakers. The piece ultimately explores states of overload, fragmentation, and sonic excess—demonstrating the impossibility of the human body becoming fully mechanized. For Jen Torrence is not only a meditation on
Haraway’s cyborg, but also a tribute to artistic kinship and collaboration, iterative inquiry, and the potential of performance as a space to investigate identity, embodiment, and our entanglements between human and machine.
Kari Watson
(they/them) is a composer, performer, and intermedia artist. Their work explores the intersections of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work.
Jennifer Torrence
is an Oslo-based percussionist/performer working internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, collaborative artist, improviser, composer, and artistic researcher. She is a member of Pinquins and Associate Professor of Percussion at the Norwegian Academy of Music.
Credits:
Kari Watson (composition)
Jennifer Torrence (percussion)
Lua Borges (video)
This piece was commissioned by and premiered at the 2025 Darmstadt Festival in Darmstadt, DE. Photo by Kristof Lemp.
