Чули? Чули / Chuly? Chuly
XR video game / MoCap performance (2024)
At Deep Space 8K, Ars Electronica Center (AT)
At Zinnema / iMaL, Brussels (BE)
translates from Ukrainian as 'Have you heard it? We've heard it' as well as 'Have you felt it? We've felt it'. The work merges performative video gameplay with live motion capture choreography to explore manipulative narratives, disinformation, and the embodiment of online personas.
The work began with the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an archaeological site in Malta, a 5,000-year-old capsule that predates continuous cultural memory and, once unsealed in 1902, accumulated urban legends and politically motivated interpretations. From this starting point, the work explores the boundary between speculation and its turn into dark speculation: a mix of conspiracy and fantasy, where speculative methods are used to serve a political goal, until speculation becomes disinformation. As a Ukrainian, Letta draws on her country people's experience of being recurring characters in Russian disinformation tactics, which, as Pekka Kallioniemi outlines in Vatnik Soup, operate as a complex blend of half-truths, manipulated facts, and historical references.
This reflection on disinformation is anchored in an already speculative story: a woman who once saw giants at the site. Her account is repeatedly processed through LLM agents to mirror disinformation tactics, each iteration remaining coherent enough to be believed yet unstable enough to resist verification. This distorted narrative indirectly guides the player through the environment, yet the cave and the giants are never revealed.
Act 1. The gameplay
Starting like an e-sports spectacle of public gameplay, the player is guided by conflicting narratives about the sighting of giants: some gentle, some fanatical, some relying on figures of authority. The narrative modification follows the method of transforming any narrative to serve the purposes of subtle disinformation, even though the base narrative is not overtly political. The e-sports setting not only allows for interactivity and suits the work's concerns, it also recalls the radicalisation that takes place within online gaming chats.
Throughout Act 1 the player reveals their mediocre gaming skills through repeated failure to reach game goals. Which, of course, is entirely by design.
Deep Space 8K Camera + NINC Media
Deep Space 8K Camera + NINC Media
Between Act 1 and Act 2
The dancer calibrates the motion capture suit in the performance space, facing the audience directly. The act of calibration becomes confrontational: the dancer looks out at the crowd as a necessary technical gesture that doubles as a challenge.
The player teleports.
Act 2. Motion Capture performance
After the teleport, the mood of the work shifts. It becomes suspicious, grows confrontational. The player sees an avatar watching her, but only later sees the human behind it.
The work is interested in the bodies behind the avatars: the one-person operations that, amplified by bot farms and AI, can be made to look like thousands. What was once the labour of entire troll farms can now be run by a single operator, their presence multiplied and their identity dissolved into the network. The dancer embodies this figure. As the suit's calibration drifts, a mismatch opens between the body and the avatar it drives: a glitch, a rift that exposes the control and connections the persona was designed to conceal.
The limitations of inertial motion capture suits become the material of the work. Electromagnetic interference and calibration drift shape the choreography, and the distortion of movement becomes a language for exploring errors as part of liveness.
The exchange of suit for controller inverts the roles entirely. Once calibrated, both characters can control the avatar simultaneously. The player becomes a calibrated Non-Player Character; the dancer, now holding the controller, becomes the camera: the one who decides what the world reveals. The distinctions between player, performer, and NPC dissolve, and with them the boundaries of their relationship to their avatars.
CREDITS:
Letta Shtohryn
Concept, CGI, environment, avatars, animation, motion capture, environment sound
Voice narration: Emma Beard (UK)
Text/voice processing: ChatGPT, 11Labs
Sound: Lena Horse (CN), Junjian Wang (AT)
3D models of life forms, rocks and meteorites: Natural History Museum Vienna
Linz team :
Player, performer, dramaturg: Julie-Michele Morin (CA)
Choreography, dance: Junjian Wang (AT)
Brussels team:
Choreography, dance : Marion Bosetti (BE), Dora Almeleh (BE)
Player 1 : Shelbatra Jashari (BE)
Conceptualisation, prototype – IT:U x Ars Electronica FOUNDING LAB
Dramaturgy, completion – Realities in Transition residency at iMaL Brussels
Co-production : iMaL Art Centre, Brussels (BE)
© 2026 Letta Shtohryn