Cavernous Bodies is a project preoccupied with the bonds and borders between living bodies and nonliving environments. Braiding speculative design, soft robotics, and object theatre, Georgia b.’s MFA thesis work brings together mechanical automation and choreographed human performance. Inflatable silicones are programmed to “breathe” alongside human performers, collapsing the sense of privileged separateness between beings and things.

Set elements include a synthetic tree that breathes, a set of disembodied lungs, and a diorama of a landscape in which miniature biospheres are isolated within respirating membranes. Performers moving through this environment are adorned with silicone wearables and tethered to air compressors. These wearables, through choreographic transitions, variously appear to be medical, fashionable, symbiotic, or parasitical.

Cavernous Bodies is suggestive of a post-human order in which wetware and software have merged, in which user and used are interchangeable, in which function and desire fall into mutuality.