Kofi Oduro/Illestpreacha is a creative coder, creative engineer, thinker, poet, and performer based in Montreal. Kofi describes his art practices as “an observation of the world around us that I then put into artworks for others to relate to or disagree with. Through Videography, Poetry and Creative Coding, I try to highlight the realms of the human performance and the human mind in different scenarios. These situations which we face in our everyday lives can be described as social, internal, or even biological. Adding music and visuals often helps to perceive one’s own feelings, and to highlight the different subtleties that make us human. With a dose of technology, there is an endless range of progress in the human creative endeavours.”
Artist Website: kofioduro.myportfolio.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/illestpreacha
Artist Twitter: twitter.com/illestpreacha
Artist Statement
Digital Exploration of the Expansion is a presentation and performance of a speculative fiction through live coding[1], creative coding, and other mediums that explores how the body can be reimagined. A speculative scientific report [2] made me think of producing a work that challenges the notion of what humanity is based on. What biology, what culture, what geology will occur if we thought differently? Thinking into the digital nature of my work, what if this realm was also controlled by how we used technology and how it uses us. By taking on a digital exploration that expands what is considered “body culture,” maybe we can engage in dialogues that expand past our normal range of ideologies. By adding sound and poetry, we will be adding a multisensory experience that engages the various senses[3], an integral part of our bodies that have to be included in any exploration of the body.
[1Livecoding: “Improvisational Code” or “on the fly code”, where the sounds, visual and/or other forms of interactivity/creativity is done through code. In this medium, the code is usually seen by the audience because that is the live component. This can be considered a subset of creative coding, where the same approach is taken but not necessarily in real time.
[2] Bacaksizlar, Gizem, Stefani A. Crabtree, Joshua Garland, N. Grefenstette, Albert B. Kao, D. Kinney, Artemy Kolchinsky, T. Marghetis, M. Price, Maria Riolo, Hajime Shimao, Ashley I. Teufel, Tamara van der Does and V. Yang. “Greetings from a Triparental Planet.” arXiv: Populations and Evolution (2020).
[3] Due to the speculative nature of this piece, the term “senses” ranges beyond the traditional five senses and may include senses such as Vestibular (Movement), Proprioception (Body Position), and “the feeling senses: sensitivity to gravity, air and wind pressure, and motion.” For more information, visit https://www.sensorytrust.org.uk/blog/how-many-senses-do-we-have.