Connor Cook is a media artist and researcher from California, now based in Amsterdam. His work asks how the abstract operations of computation become sensible in the body. Through real-time simulations and hardware interfaces, he designs informatic circuits that stage novel relationships between bodies and machines. His work has been shown at the Eye Filmmuseum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Prada Frames, Singapore Art Museum, and V-A-C Zattere. Recently, he taught at the Design Academy Eindhoven and was an affiliate researcher with Antikythera, a think-tank in planetary computation.

"BE AGGRESSIVE! is a VJ performance inspired by the machinic spectacle that is competitive cheerleading. The performance is built upon an extensive motion library captured during my time as an athlete on the Dutch national cheerleading team. Using Unreal Engine and Ableton, I sample and remix this library to produce a virtual cheerleading routine. The world mirrors the rich aesthetic excess of the sport: glitter, rhinestones, flashing lights, and fireworks coincide with dynamic configurations of bodies acting as machines. The performance extends and expands the machinic underpinnings of the sport, using the operations of synchronization, discretization, repetition, and collapse as compositional tools."