Stroking a cat backwards
Naoto Hieda with J N Harrington
Animation: Naoto Hieda
For Satellising Harrington invited Naoto Hieda to translate her gridy-spirally choreographic score for Satelliser into a sensory graphic. Stroking a cat backwards is a (choreo)graphic coded animation made by Naoto in response to Harrington’s descriptions of the spatial- relational operations of Satelliser, its shifts over time from the inside and how she imagined that might look if the whole day were recorded.
Hieda and Harrington found interest in talking to each other about choreography and coding in 2016 when they realised they had different but connected experiences of neurodiversity. Their conversations started out by noticing similarities in the ways they experienced thinking and how that manifested in their disciplines: across dancing, space design, engineering, graphics, choreography and work with coding languages in practice as metaphorically. They began a collaborative dialogue in 2018 with an online residency Call Stack with Favoriten Festival, Germany following research at the Choreographic Coding Lab, Amsterdam, 2017.
Image: Luise Flügge
Naoto Hieda (they/them)
Naoto Hieda is an artist from Japan, based in Cologne with a background in engineering (B.Eng. from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and M.Eng. from McGill University, Canada) and currently enrolled in Diplom II at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. They question the productive aspect of coding to speculate its new form, namely post-coding, through neurodiversity and live-coding.
Image: Christa Holka
J N Harrington(she/her)
J N Harrington is an artist whose work includes writing, dance & choreography, drawing, video, installation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neuroqueer experiences of information processing: mishearing, equational-images, listening, ways of tethering attention in movement... Her recent works include Screensaver Series (2018), storage for future sunsets (2021, Scottish Dance Theatre & V&A Dundee), good luck dinosaur (2020) , believe/ been video essay (2020), UNFRIENDING (2021), never closer to midnight (2019) and leading the Satelliser project.
Harrington’s educational background is in visual arts, psychology and dance. As a performer she has worked within museum and gallery contexts across Europe. She is a board member of Chisenhale Dance Space in London and was involved with Engagement Arts Belgium 2017/18. She works to support other artists with access through grant-writing, and mentors around neurodiversity in dance.