Rapid collective experimentation moved from material construction to live performance.
Experimental wearable performance · 2016
The Multiple Personalities of Jessica Nussbaum
A performance developed through three days of experimentation, in which long textile prostheses turn bodies into vivid insect–human hybrids.
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Project typeArtwork · Performance · Collaboration
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Speculative & critical design
FormExperimental wearable performance
Developed2016
ContextTranshumanism Performance Lab
PresentedMusic Tech Fest Berlin
01 · Proposition
Identity extends beyond the edge of the body
The Multiple Personalities of Jessica Nussbaum uses elongated prostheses, layered textiles and collective movement to imagine a body that is multiple, unstable and open to its surroundings.
The work emerged during a three-day Transhumanism Performance Lab at Music Tech Fest Berlin. Improvised wearable structures wrap, mask and lengthen the performers’ bodies. Flexible rods and lines continue far beyond the hands and torso, creating new spatial limits and new possibilities for gesture.
The resulting figures sit between insect and human. Moving through the performance space, they interact with one another and with the audience; every extension makes proximity, collision and entanglement newly visible. The costume is not a surface applied to an unchanged body, but a temporary anatomy that reorganises how the performer occupies space and relates to others.
02 · Experience
Construct, inhabit, encounter
- 01
Construct
Textiles, masks, padding and long flexible prostheses assemble a body with unfamiliar proportions and reach.
- 02
Inhabit
The performer learns how the extended form bends, resists, frames vision and changes ordinary movement.
- 03
Encounter
The hybrid bodies move among one another and the audience, making distance and entanglement part of the performance.
03 · Reflection
A costume can propose another anatomy
The work treats transhumanism as a material and performative question rather than an image of technological perfection.
These bodies are conspicuously handmade, excessive and difficult to control. Their prostheses increase reach but also introduce friction, vulnerability and dependence on space and other people. The project therefore complicates the fantasy that bodily extension simply means mastery. Multiple personality becomes spatial and relational: identity shifts through costume, movement, encounter and the changing boundaries of the body.
Long lightweight prostheses altered reach, balance, silhouette and interpersonal distance.
Insect-like figures negotiated one another, the architecture and a live audience.
Exhibition history
Selected presentations
Transhumanism Performance Lab
Music Tech Fest Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Credits & archive
Project record
- Concept and wearable experimentation
- Ricardo O’Nascimento
- Performance and embodied experimentation
- Jessica Nussbaum and Transhumanism Performance Lab participants
- Production context
- Music Tech Fest Berlin
