Backfeeding Excess

May 31
3 min read

CENTER[O]POSITIVE

POLLUX (Nick Dunston & Min Yoon)

Premiere: 17. April 2026

Other Performances: 18 + 19. April 2026

UFERSTUDIOS, Berlin

Review by: Alice Heyward

23. April 2026

“Feedback” originates in engineering theory, describing a process in which a system’s output is routed back into its input. Through this lens, “negative” and “positive” denote relation rather than value: negative feedback counteracts or stabilises an initiating signal by reducing deviation from its conditions, while positive feedback amplifies it, intensifying its effects within those same conditions.

In CENTER[O]POSITIVE by Min Yoon and Nick Dunston, working under the banner POLLUX, positive “feedback” circulates as a material process. The artists generate circuits between movement, instrumentation, and vocalisation, in which outputs return and re-enter the circuit to produce what they term “an unstable archive.” Signals are driven into escalation, accumulating into dense, volatile loops of movement, sound, and image. These unfold through a delayed web of call-and-response, unsettling conventions of controlled equilibrium, measurement and

synchronicity. Effects increase their causes, amplifying change without seeking the climax of completion.

Uferstudios Studio 1 is strewn with compact speakers, amplifiers, and cables that extend across the floor like a vascular network. Banjos lie among this electronic field, while two tables of equipment sit within the space. Yoon begins the work supine, centrally immersed in this dispersed system of inputs and outputs, as Dunston constructs the layered soundscape: high- pitched squeals and low-frequency rumbles emerge as the banjo is amplified to capture and reprocess its own signal. Sound folds back in on itself, engulfing the space with abrasive, unstable, self-generating loops. My body jolts in an automatic reaction to the fizzing of what I habitually recognise as the unpleasant sound of feedback to be avoided in live performance. Yet the duo works generatively with this excess of technical production; the work sustains a physical pressure of sound and movement, as outputs of the same vibrating matter composing runaway cycles of rhythms in the space.

Yoon’s body responds as though awakened by the sonic environment, twitching, coiling, flicking, bouncing. Their movements appear less internally initiated than driven by waves moving into and through them, passing and modulating skin and flesh into bone as vibrating matter.

Yoon’s skeleton, a tensegrity structure, seems to deform and reform within the charged field, its effects rippling back outward into space through micro-shakes, expanding as a dense, resistant presence. Piezoelectricity is the electric charge that accumulates in certain materials, including bone in our bodies, in response to applied mechanical stress. The performers’ bodies are moved differently by the shared force field of colliding signals, both in constant motion. Dunston’s movements are often larger and faster, pulsing and rebounding in elastic cycles as he navigates spatial frequencies through contact with equipment. Yoon’s movements, emerging from a ‘post- butoh’ practice, are slower, registering the pops and shrieks of the sonic field in delayed, sequenced gestures. The relationship between the two performers doesn’t feel controlled by tight choreographic codes, allowing each other’s idiosyncrasies and differences to take space, connected, not predefined by the other. Few compositional moments unite them in syncrony; toward the end of the show, they lie next to each other and raise their heads toward us in the stalls, mouths agape, conjuring the image of patients on parallel beds reacting to tampering with their wires.

Footage is projected onto a large screen at the back of the space, showing events from earlier moments in the performance and different angles, emphasising the archive as a formation of transmission through haunting delay. The image shifts into infrared and X-ray-like abstractions, intensifying the sense of immersion as forces appear to pass through and across bodies and images, proliferating into infinitesimal, shifting crystallisations. The instability of memory and record, gradually constructs a field of asynchronous differentiation, pressing toward collapse through distortion, yet continually reforming within its own recursive loop. We, as the audience, remain voyeurs in this strange world of bouncing signals, a vignette that moves both forward and back in time toward a speculative, almost nostalgic future-past, where technology and bodies meet in unsettling, highly productive prostheses.