Throwing Like a Girl (1980 till tomorrow)

Throwing Like a Girl (1980 till tomorrow) is a multi-channel audio-visual installation centred on an exchange between two women throwing and catching a softball. As the game unfolds over an extended duration, the performers’ movements gradually synchronise until they appear to function as a single organism. Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s 1980 feminist essay, the work examines embodied coordination as a dynamic negotiation between brain, body, and environment.

In the installation, viewers are immersed in a projection of the performance's slow-motion recording, accompanied by spatialised sound, presented alongside a monitor displaying animated brain activity. A second video-sound work presents synthetic motion traces of the performance as animated forms. Embodied and computational rhythms drift in and out of alignment, and optimisation and error alternate across the system of human and machinic layers.

Developed during a residency at Yale University’s Wu Tsai Institute, the performance was recorded using high-speed machine vision, motion capture, and a wearable neural measurement device.

Software: Motion capture: Motive 3.0 program for acquiring data. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS):Aurora fNIRS Recording Software, Custom PyVista rendering code. Pro Tools, Logic Pro

Hardware: Motion capture: 12 OptiTrack PrimeX 22 cameras, Passive IR reflective markers. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS): NIRSport 2 system

• https://www.sigune.co.uk
• https://wti.yale.edu