The project Чули? Чули (Chuly? Chuly), translating from Ukrainian as “Have you heard? We’ve heard/Have you felt it? We've felt it”, merges performative video gameplay with choreography to delve into manipulative narratives and the embodiment of online personas. It engages with narratives shaped by human-led troll farms and AI, anchored in a speculative story from a woman who once saw giants. Her narrative, twisted by ChatGPT to reflect online misinformation tactics, indirectly guides the player through the environment, yet never reveals the discussed cave and giants. This work looks at today's giants—enormous, planetary, interconnected, and mostly invisible entities; AGIs, pandemics, secret weapons, and disinformation itself; some engineered and run by humans, others self-materializing, shapeshifting.
By setting expectations for perfection with AAA-game-like realistic worlds, the project intentionally subverts these expectations by working with the limitations of inertial motion capture suits. The susceptibility of these suits to electromagnetic interference becomes a core part of the choreography. The dancer's movements, distorted by the suit's gradual calibration loss, create choreography that embraces digital imperfection, disentangling the digital persona from its body, and exploring errors as part of liveness.
Letta Shtohryn (UA / EU) works with XR, CGI, VR, machinima and video games.
Her academic background is in philosophy and photography. Letta is a PhD candidate in Digital Arts.
Currently she is based at Ars Electronica's Founding Lab in Linz, Austria, where she explores embodiment, myth-making, and belief via XR.
In her work, Letta explores posthumanism, SFs, intuitive epistemologies, entanglements with machines, avatars, aliens, monsters, ghosts.
Recently, her works have been shown at the Ars Electronica festival (AT), Goldsmiths College, London (UK), Centre Pompidou (FR), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (AT), MUZA (MT), Milan Machinima Festival (IT), Frieze Art Fair (NYC).
Credits
Concept, CGI, environment, avatars, animation, motion capture, environment sound: Letta Shtohryn
Voice narration: Emma Beard
Text/voice processing: ChatGPT, 11Labs
Sound: Lena Horse, Junjian Wang, Letta Shtohryn
3D models of life forms, rocks and meteorites: Natural History Museum Vienna
Conceptualization, prototype – IT:U x Ars Electronica FOUNDING LAB
Dramaturgy, completion – Realities in Transition residency at iMaL Brussels
Letta portrait image by Patrick Münnich