01: Vessel   02: Burning   03: Foil   04: Soft   05: Collect
Song Xin: Agency, Recursivity, and the Body's Soft Technology, Veronica Gisondi
April 2025



Song Xin, Boundary Condition, 2025, performance. Courtesy of the artist

A body is crouching, curled, in a church that is also a forest. Under the magnificent, eternal limbs of trees, reborn as man-made baroque vaults, is a ritual led by flashlight. Critter, oracle, and herald, Song Xin roams in the porous territories that connect organic and machinic existence, overcoming the dichotomy that separates the two. Xin speaks through live performance: she tests the limits of human perception and agency to reclaim the body’s autonomy and permeability — as in her recent piece Boundary Condition, presented at St James Garlickhythe Church (2025).

To Song Xin, the soft boundaries of the body — both as subject and object of inquiry — are the primary interface that mediates and often heightens the productive tension that binds us to technology. Throughout her practice, Xin has been exploring ways bodies resist, rupture, and reconstruct themselves through their relationship with technical systems. With a background in digital art, 3D modeling, sculpture, sound-based work, fashion and set design, her approach to body practices combines a distinct sensibility for the spatio-temporal dimension of somatic experience with technical prowess and agility. At present, her research weaves together a wide net of interrelated topics, tapping into fields of study such as emotional responses within control systems, sensorial thresholds in immersive interfaces, and the political dimension of perceptual experience, while also investigating the potential of non-linear narratives, sensory disruption, and soft spatialities.

Faced with the ongoing fragmentation of reality, Song Xin has recently been engaging with speculative storytelling as a mode of resistance to structural command. Writing is her response to the collapse of the sensorial, linguistic, and narrative frameworks that traditionally upheld the world’s order. Besides its social and material implications, this technologically-mediated fracture is affecting the ways we apprehend the world, which is why Xin turned to writing — to examine states of supra-individual, symbiotic perception in relation to geological flows and technological advancements. We’ve spoken about the essential role softness plays across her work, Yuk Hui’s influence on her art, and how different human and non-human organisms — be it bodies, machines, or the Earth itself — shape each other’s potential.

Veronica Gisondi: How does the body’s constitutive softness inform your creative process?

Song Xin: My creative process continually reconnects me with this softness. At first, I went through a kind of post-human fantasy where I was hoping to evoke a transcendent state through technology or structural forms, projecting that desire back onto myself. However, when I began engaging directly in performance, I felt a deep sense of unease toward bodily expression. I couldn’t convince myself to inhabit a body that felt overly staged or artificially constructed. Was it due to my lack of formal training, or had I simply not yet established an authentic relationship with my own body? My body still has to adapt to these unfamiliar formats — it longs to unfold naturally, but it remains hesitant.

So I stopped pushing it. I began listening to its vulnerability, observing its anxiety and hesitation, and trusting that there’s energy embedded in those states. This unformatted, raw bodily condition has become the entry point for the speculative writing I’m doing now. Softness and vulnerability aren’t just channels of communication to me — they are highly sensitive perceptual interfaces. It’s precisely the body’s softness, its instability, that becomes a form of resistance to the illusion of technological coherence. It keeps pulling me back to the beginning, urging me to reexamine the relationship between technology, media, and the languages I create with. In this process, I often feel like I’m resisting a loss while being lost. I still don’t know exactly where I am, but that indeterminacy itself offers a new kind of clarity, a closeness to something real.

When do you feel the most permeable (or vulnerable, even)?

I've always perceived myself as sensitive and vulnerable. And yet, alongside that sensitivity, I carry a strong determination to see things as they truly are. It's often this insistence on truth that causes me to mess up relationships or push situations into states of discomfort or even collapse. I often ask myself: why are we so prone to dishonesty, not only toward others but toward ourselves as well? Perhaps our vulnerability pushes us to bluff, exaggerate our self-images, and overwork ourselves in an attempt to prove some transcendent worth. We even withhold sincere praise from others out of fear or self-protection. What I want is to become more aware of this vulnerability — not to fix it, but to accept it as a condition of being.

You generously re-introduced me to Yuk Hui’s work when we met, which I’m very grateful for. In Recursivity and Contingency (2019), Hui states that technology, just like the body, is recursive: a process of continuous self-generation, where “every trace presents a questioning,” and difference means creation. I’d be curious to hear more about your relationship to this concept.

Besides my interest in the philosophical text itself, I resonate with Yuk Hui’s notion of “recursivity” because of how intimately it aligns with my own lived experience, which is why I repeatedly return to it. Growing up in a place with limited technological access and subsequently relocating from a small town to Beijing, Shanghai, and ultimately London, every shift in my environment and informational context has compelled me to re-examine who I am — and who I could potentially become. This unending self-interrogation, a process of repeated reflection and self-reference, is deeply uncomfortable, sometimes even risky. Yet, it is precisely this discomfort that generates an enormous creative potential.

It's a dangerous and ambiguous state: you feel as if you could become anyone — whoever you wish to be — but, at the same time, your sense of self becomes increasingly blurred and uncertain. It’s no longer a static or fixed entity; it’s something that emerges from the collisions and exchanges between inner and outer worlds, constantly subjected to questioning and reflection. Courage, then, acts as a catalyst that brings unpredictable forms of contingency to the fore, which aren’t random: on the contrary, they emerge as unique mutations shaped by individual foundations. Produced by the interactions between self and environment, they’re accompanied by perpetual self-doubt and reconstruction.

In this sense, the body is a medium that’s ceaselessly sensing the world, accumulating traces of experience, and redefining itself through these traces. Technology, in Hui’s idea of recursivity, isn’t solely a tool or external force — it is deeply intertwined with human bodies, social structures, and cultural contexts. Since technology and the body share the same recursive logic, they should no longer be seen as separate entities: while technology shapes the body's behaviors and perceptual abilities, the body keeps redefining technology’s potential.

Where does your interest in technology and machines stem from?

It might have started as an aesthetic admiration — which isn’t just an appreciation of machines and technology itself, but a longing for a kind of ability that transcends everyday life, as I mentioned earlier. It’s a transformation beyond reality, a swapping of identities between human and machine, and a subversive politics. Here the body is lost, but not dead. Machines help us build narrative frameworks that are non-gendered, non-maternal, and non-familial. Besides making us reflect on current social structures, they can push us to question their validity. In this regard, I'd like to quote one of my favorite science fiction writers, Greg Egan: “We can understand everything, as long as we are brave enough. The self is an illusion, choice does not exist, and truth is not a building but quicksand. How do we survive in a turbulent world?” If the self is an illusion, love and ideals are too, and the womb becomes an illusion of maternal love, which stops being what nurtures life. However, it all comes at a cost. There’s the fear of signing a pact — a sense of unavoidable participation — but it’s through this process that we might traverse a state of re-synthesis, that is, both a reconstruction and a complete subversion of past experiences.

Could you expand on the body’s value and significance to your practice?

In the Skin and Bones series (2024), Rosie Muhan Yuan and I became deeply interested in how humans and technology merge. Peter-Paul Verbeek argues that humans have never existed in isolation, but always move toward the development of reality — which is typically mediated by technology. This inspired us to create a technological instrument that can merge with the performer. On the other hand, when I performed at Somers Gallery with Arna Beth (2025), we worked with simple materials, without any preset or complex technology. We were like comrades in the apocalypse, determined to dissolve each other's bodies and reconstruct our desires, reshaping the original myth of Nüwa (in Chinese folk religion, Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, the goddess that created humanity by hand, molding humans individually with yellow clay). Last February, in my performance Boundary Condition at James Garlickhythe Church (2025), I explored the interaction between real-world light and light in virtual game engines, in continuity with a residency I did in 2024 in Germany, The Year of Sonic Confession. During the residency, we spent almost all our time with nature and each other. The performance reminded me of a night with my residency friends, where we buried a jar of pickles in the forest of Saxon Switzerland. At the residency we make them every year and bury them in the forest, so that the next year’s residents can find them and eat them. I knew that those traces — microbes fermenting in time and space — would be reactivated in some distant moment. I felt the subtle changes of fermentation, the moisture of the earth, and the stillness of the forest. Then, light weaved new visual and auditory narratives, while everything else drifted and transformed in the unknown. The collision and fusion of media are merely different ways of expressing desire, which is the reason why we recognize each other.




Song Xin, Boundary Condition, 2025, performance. Courtesy of the artist

What does a “desiring body” mean to you, and what can it do?

It’s a body that seeks autonomy and agency on the levels of cognition, perception, and will. Modern technology, particularly in the fields of military and information warfare, is profoundly influencing our modes of perception, cognition, and our freedom of choice. It’s not just about controlling physiological needs, but a weakening of individual self-sovereignty and a suppression of free will. The desiring body isn’t just a subject seeking the fulfillment of desires — it’s an agent capable of resistance and self-healing. Desire, then, appears as a response to the systemic control of the body and the manipulation of cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. I believe that, by amplifying the agency of the body, individuals can regain control over their self-perception and cognition. Ultimately, a desiring body is an intertwining of consciousness and perception, a vehicle for seeking liberation within complex social and technological systems, and a key element of resistance.  

Technology is both a means of action and a system that conditions the body’s behaviour. How does technology interact with your identity, agency, and autonomy — is it a tool of affirmation, or does it lead to a more fundamental questioning, as suggested by Hui?

Technology has never been merely instrumental in my practice. When I first encountered computational arts, it entered my life almost as a kind of “tamer.” I began learning multiple programming languages, and while deeply attracted by their complexity and beauty, I simultaneously experienced a feeling of linguistic constraint or blockage. If I look back at my undergraduate work, I realize how it was almost a kind of aphasia — I was trying to express something meaningful, but technological pathways only allowed me to utter fragmented words, as if my language was stuck or broken. Structurally speaking, technology has deeply shaped my actions and choices. It has influenced my sense of what is achievable and influenced my expectations about the audience’s experience. The seductive power of technology continues to direct my thoughts, but I feel an increasing need to break away from this dependency — to engage more frequently with writing and performance, practices that originate from a non-technological form of generativity, which also offer an immediate, embodied feedback.

Technology has influenced my sense of identity in an equivocal way. It initially offered me the post-human fantasy I talked about before (that I would transcend my limitations through it), which, at times, I even embraced performatively. I’ve stopped idealizing or fixating on this superhuman capacity, though. I’d rather admit that when technical systems malfunction, especially right before a performance, I become anxious, unsettled, even helpless. Such uncertainty can bring me close to breakdown, revealing a profound loss of autonomy. In these moments, I’m keenly aware that rather than using technology, I’m the one being used by it. For me, technology is not just a tool to confirm who I am — it’s indeed a mechanism of questioning. It’s not a means to develop a fixed, stable identity: it constantly pushes me off track, throwing me into cycles of self-doubt and reinvention. If technology were purely a means of confirming identity or maximizing efficiency, it would be profoundly uninteresting to me. I've recently started imagining technology as a way to access geological scales — a medium through which we can come to terms with the possibility of human extinction.

Understood as a paradigm, softness “underscores the capacity of materials to autonomously organise and transform, showing how form and matter, human intelligence, and non-human agency can influence and shape one another,” as Laura Tripaldi argues (2025). Within your work I can see a through-line that connects microorganisms, geological time, obscure languages, and the inhuman abyss of the unknown. What could we learn from this — from them?

Softness has gradually become a core perceptual logic across my work. It’s not just about the physical properties of materials but, more profoundly, about a loosening and reshaping of structures, scales, and boundaries. Lately, to articulate this soft worldview, I’ve been experimenting with fiction — starting with a body gradually collapsing due to sensory hypersensitivity, progressing into symbiotic networks of perception, and eventually into the dissolution of individual consciousness. It’s an overloaded sensory experience that’s not unlike the drifting, shifting, and colliding tectonic plates. In this narrative, the body becomes a trembling node that interacts fungal networks, geological movements, technological signals, and dream-like languages, forming a decentralized perceptual field. This condition reveals how genuine generativity does not emerge from resistance or control, but from a state of negotiation.

Softness doesn’t imply weakness or compromise; it signifies a heightened sensitivity to the boundaries of the self, an ability to listen and respond to relationships among multiple co-existing systems. Softness represents the capacity to deeply trust things that are unstable, uncontrollable, and indescribable. It implies believing in the ongoing potential for revision between matter and perception. It’s an anti-controlling stance, in a way — an openness to the natural unfolding of changes, delays, and overlaps. Growth rhythms, evolutionary scales, and the irreducible complexities of non-human elements are crucial guides in my practice. They have taught me that, instead of trying to control outcomes, it’s far more meaningful to cultivate an intimate relationship with softness itself. Uncertainty isn’t a threat but a gateway to a new mode of existence. This soft interconnectedness teaches us how, after deconstruction, new meanings can still emerge. The protagonist in my story undergoes sensory fragmentation to become an anonymous node that resonates with material vibrations. Dissolving into an unnamed yet tangible geological flow is my deepest fantasy of belonging.


Veronica Gisondi is a writer and translator based in Milan. She works across critical theory, poetry, contemporary art and cultural criticism. Her writing has been featured on Rivista Studio, Conceptual Fine Arts, Coeval Magazine, Jungle Magazine, Lampoon Magazine, SINK and Droste Effect Magazine, among others.

song xin's work evolves from fashion and computational arts to performance and body practices. In her creations, the relationship between technological systems and the body is not one of collaboration, but a process of rupture and reconstruction. She uses games and performance to test reality, where the body becomes a site for exploration, resistance, and self-redefinition within the ever-evolving spaces of the virtual and the real. Her solo and collaborative works have been presented in London (IKLECTIK, Artsect Gallery, Fold), Berlin, Leipzig, Shanghai, Vicenza, Poznań, and beyond. Currently based in London.




published in London, UK
ISSN 3049-8104
2023–2025