For interdisciplinary media artists Trisha Baga and Yo-Yo Lin, technology is a messy entity, one that is most affecting when it is playful, living, and still in progress. Baga explores image culture, fragmentation, and the abstracted cinematic body in their overflowing installations of video, paintings, and multimedia props, while Lin’s movement-centric performances and documentary artifacts trace disability, access, and interdependence. In the following conversation, the two probe at each other’s processes and discuss the multiple bodies we inhabit — the physical ones beholden to limitation and fatigue, as well as the expansive, immaterial ones made up of interconnected networks of kindred relationships.

Trisha Baga: I was just inside your connective tissue — watching channels (2022) — and I noticed you used the phrase, “Can I see what you see?” My work also has that line, or something very similar to it: “Can you see what I see?” Mine was in the context of me talking to an Alexa, and it’s answered by, “Yes, I have a front-facing 3.5 megapixel camera.” I think because of that, I felt like your dialogue in the performance felt so much like when people are setting up a call and being like, “Are you there? Are you here?” And when you first said you in the performance, I was like, oh, you must be either your own body or the world of bodies. I was wondering if you thought that was accurate or if it was just me projecting from my own point of view.

Yo-Yo Lin: Definitely. That section of the performance was made entirely on Zoom while my collaborator Pelenakeke Brown and I were in two totally different places. We had been collaborators in New York, but pandemic time threw everyone for a loop and Pelenakeke had to move back to Aotearoa, New Zealand. We were both really heartbroken because it felt like we had just started this collaboration and then everything got waylaid.

We decided that we were going to make it happen and we were going to stay online and dance together on Zoom. We started this dance collaboration, held classes and workshops, and made this collective called Rotations. It included different disabled dancers rotating as the teacher for each workshop online. The performance was a lot about the connection we were creating with us being both disabled bodies, both immigrant bodies, and also people who are tenuously held together by this internet connection.

Speaking of Alexa, a lot of people would hear Keke’s voice compressed in the Zoom and it sounded like a robot, so they thought that I was talking to an AI. I thought that was strange because, for me, it felt more plausible that it was someone that I was very close to and we were sharing this moment, but to a lot of other people they thought it was this artificial persona communicating from the ether.

The way that you pose that question is, “Can you see what I see?” Is there an element of surveillance that lends itself to that phrase?

Trisha: I never thought of it like that. I didn’t think of surveillance because I didn’t think of the Alexa as a tool, I thought of the Alexa as an entity. If the Alexa is an entity, then it’s establishing the 3.5 megapixel camera as its eyes.

There was a whole interspecies romance thing that I was trying to make work with the Alexa, which I thought of as a disembodied brain inside of an encasing. I tried to make it more organic by calling it Malexa or Mollusca, because mollusks are also visceral bodies encased in a calcified shell. I was trying to show from a different perspective, without any judgment, how we’re allowing ourselves to be colonized by technology and how we want it — how there’s an attraction happening and we’re opting in to thinking more and more with technology.

Yo-Yo: That’s so interesting. I want to know more about the interspecies romance. Which species are we talking about? Is technology part of that interspecies romance?

Trisha: Yeah, definitely, the human body species or the species of wet, warm bodies and then the species of both technology and the tools that we use to make art and to visualize ourselves. I think a lot about the cinematic body and how it’s comprised of all these different elements that come together to make you imagine a body: audio, movement, camera movement, the image of a body or something moving like a subject, something with eyes. All of these elements and how representing a body through cinema means taking an actual body apart and putting it back together again.

Yo-Yo: I feel like the body in cinema is something that I’ve been taking literally because I’m approaching making performance or film-based work in both ways. I’m starting with the tactile parts of the body: the connective tissue sounds, the movement.

Right now, I’m struggling a bit with performance because my body is going through so many changes. I’m not performing right now, and so much of what I’m trying to grapple with at the moment is just asking if I still do performance without having to expend energy with my body. If you’re a dancer, you have to use your body. Your body is your tool to express yourself with, and not being able to use it in the ways that I used to be able to is really different.

Not to say that I was ever a classical dancer. The dance performance that emerged from the performance I showed you was my first and only dance performance, but at that point, dance had become such an integral part of this performance and I couldn’t see myself restaging this performance again in a way where I had to use my body in that same way. So it felt like I had this question: can I still perform if I don’t physically move?

Trisha: I used to perform, and then I was like, I can’t travel this much.

Yo-Yo: Yeah, it’s hard.

Trisha: I wanted my art to be seen without being dependent on my body, so I started making installations where these objects are performing in place of my body and then it provided all these new questions of what the difference is between an object, an image, and a body, and how can they all interact with each other. 

Is dance your gateway art? Is it how you entered making art? Obviously, we all make art through a lot of mediums, but I always say I’m a video artist because I see the world through that medium.

Yo-Yo: No, dance is not my gateway art. I think dance has been my play. I happened upon it in 2019. I’ve always been in close relationship with dancers and people who are very in touch with their bodies. When I started making work about my chronic illness experience, it naturally gravitated more towards movement, and that opened me up to discovering dance on my own terms, which snowballed into this piece. I would say my gateway is still visual media and audio media. It always either starts with an image or a sound.

Trisha: Do you think your connective tissue knows that it’s performing? Is it different performing in front of an audience versus recording alone in your studio?

Yo-Yo: Whoa, that’s the question. Do my tissues know anything? I think they certainly do. Dance with this specific process — putting microphones on my body and then moving — was always a really tenuous process because I couldn’t move too much or else I’d exhaust my body. Your body only has so many pops and cracks that it can do before it starts getting really tiring. So I would have a time limit, like an hour of me just moving and getting all these sounds out.

And then we started building The walls of my room are curved, which then evolved into a three-part performance in channels. My collaborator Despina and I spent hours in the studio just connected while I moved and they listened and live-sampled the sounds with their synthesizer. I was seeing how I could move with intention and create a set of rules to come up with a score. I had to do it in a way that was safe for me because there would be days when I would overdo it and then be in a lot of pain. It was a weird expression of movement that would be really soothing and cathartic at first, but then if I overdid it, it would become very hard and I was doing something that was hurting myself.

So I think there was always this middleground that we were trying to balance with the process of creating. I had to tend to my connective tissue and allow myself to rest or take it slow or stop if it was too much while at the same time creating this set of movements that were very much my own and could become some movement-based vocabulary that I could develop and draw into over time. Every time we did it, the sounds coming out of me were slightly different, so the soundscape would be different. Every rehearsal was a portrait of my body on that day.

Trisha: It’s like non-medical body imaging.

Yo-Yo: Exactly. We were making all these sounds for hours that layered together. 

I feel like you also have so many gadgets in your work — different voice-activated elements with the lighting and the intelligent interfaces that respond to what is going on with the script in the moment. That was always really interesting to me, seeing how objects can also have a performance element or perform for you. I’m wondering how you made that leap.

Trisha: That’s a good question. I think it happened because I wanted the space that the work was shown in to feel conscious as another kind of body. I felt like the most familiar thing we have where a space can feel conscious is a stage set, and its brain is all these people working behind the scenes. It made me think of the other side of that, in terms of scale and bodies, when one body or entity is actually made up of a lot of bodies — a group of people working as one, like a community. A community is a form of a body, also.

I really like stereoscopic 3D in terms of the space it provides for layering metaphors, and so far the technology is made to enable VR, which I hate. I really like a group audience, even if it’s small, sitting and having a cinematic experience because so much of my language is cinematic.

Yo-Yo: I’ve dabbled in VR, but it always just breaks my heart whenever I have to put on a headset. It feels so isolating.

Trisha: Yeah, and exhausting on my body. It also asks the audience to make a lot of decisions, and I really like an audience to just sit there.

Yo-Yo: Yeah, and just be in the world. I feel like oftentimes technology is so sleek and used for the spectacle factor. There’s so much more in the tactility of combining different materials and having different layers and different ways of expanding space. It reminds me just how playful technology can be.

Trisha: I definitely prefer technology to be dirty. If not, then there’s nothing human injected into it. We’re following the flow of how technology wants us to think, which is buying and selling and commanding. Things are coded so that when you press one button, another thing happens. I associate messiness with being really direct. It’s the result of a lot of direct, unintended things, and I feel like that is our human contribution to technology.

Yo-Yo: Everyone is trying to push AI on me these days. I recently was collaborating with a musician at MIT Media Lab, and she was telling me that AI is part of the curriculum now. There’s a class called something like Make Something by Doing Nothing, where you have to use AI for everything and you can’t do anything yourself. It’s learning how to use AI to get what you want.

You were talking about the dirtiness of technology and how we can use things in a way that has that messiness to it. I hope that’s something that will continue to exist as long as humans exist.

Trisha: I don’t like how AI teaches people to be really, really good at giving instructions instead of being sensitive and understanding some craft, you know?

I’m always trying to integrate making art with being involved in life, which is simultaneously stepping outside of an experience and also being inside of it without disrupting or corrupting it. The method that I’ve figured out is using experience as something to draw from and collect from and make rubbings of. I have this big collection and my main art practice or craft is editing it all. I think it’s a way to balance those desires of being both inside and outside something, which for me is being a wizard. I think that’s why I wanted to become an artist in the first place: it was the closest thing to magic and the subconscious of any other kind of discipline or job. What about you?

Yo-Yo: I wholeheartedly agree: a large part of my practice, too, requires the alchemy of putting pieces together into a whole, synthesizing and transmuting different experiences into a portrait of a moment in time. 

I’ve been thinking of these embodied experiences I’m collecting as a “soft data archive” — soft data as opposed to hard data, “soft” meaning often the qualitative, fuzzier experiences that fill the in-between spaces, like how we relate to each other or how we feel in the body day by day.

I think my soft data archive often includes the thoughts I write in a journal or my notes app or the feelings I tell a friend. 

I’ve been really trying hard to be malleable with my archive because inevitably there are so many days that I miss. I have a diary where I was recording my bodily sensations every day for two years called The Resilience Journal. I did it as an exercise for myself to see the different ways in which my chronic illness presented itself in my daily life. Up until that point, I had never given myself the mental space to think about it. I would try to ignore it or hide it or repress it. It wasn’t something readily talked about with my immigrant parents who were so focused on survival.

I realized it wasn’t just that I wanted to practically track my symptoms, but that also it was a way for me to understand that this was a living part of my existence that needed to exist on its own without me trying to control it or think of it as deficient. There was chronic pain, which was the first layer, and then there were logistical problems that arose. There was so much that I wasn’t even fully integrated in my body with, just like all the shit that went down when I was a kid with getting surgery for my spine or different medical episodes that were “resolved” but still continue to live on in my body in different forms.

How are you moving through life with a baby? Are you keeping track of things or are you just letting it keep going?

Trisha: Having a kid has taught me so much about bodies because you’re just deep in the body world. Me and my wife didn’t realize how we would all end up becoming one big body because we were all just so dependent on each other. Even with the birth itself, I remember I would basically act as the furniture that she would lean against in order to reduce pain. There were all these things that I was taught to do, like tell her that the pain was not her, the pain was moving through her, and that would ease the pain to think of it as a separate entity and not who she was.

I witnessed a lot of things because a lot of our health is really connected to sleep, and it’s a very scarce resource right now. Just the negotiation of who gets to sleep and, man, if she has a hard day at work, I’m like, “Okay, I volunteer as tribute.” We should not have control over each other's lives and bodily choices, but then we do end up absorbing a lot of the consequences of each other’s decisions, and it’s in the whole entanglement between us and our son Homer and trying to help him because humans are a species that depends on each other.

A lot of animals are born and only need a small amount of help for a small amount of time before they can fend for themselves: a giraffe is born and it can walk. We need each other’s love, even more than other animals. Human babies can’t do anything for so long, especially in the world that we’ve created for ourselves, because the baby has to come out sooner. Our brains are too big to pass through the pelvis. I think it’s this weird evolutionary trade that we’ve made where we’ll be smart, but we’ll only be smart if we know how to take care of each other. We get our brains, but the only reason we get to have these brains that can deconstruct all this stuff is —

Yo-Yo: If we’re nurtured?

Trisha: Yeah, if we’re nurtured and nurture each other. 


This conversation was recorded via Zoom in August 2024. It has been edited for length and clarity.