Performance Operating System: The System is the Work
Date: Friday, June 5, 2026
Time: 13:45 – 14:30
Where: Main Stage, Unicorn Factory Lisboa
Description:
The body is technology - the most ancient, the most democratic, the most universally shared.
For sixty years, ephemeral art has carried a structural problem: every model for preserving it depends on something outside the work itself. Operator built the Performance Operating System - an open on-chain architecture that holds every parameter needed to regenerate a live performance: choreography, music, notation, costume, motion data, and conservation manual.
It lets that performance happen again indefinitely - without the artists, without an institution, without permission.
In this keynote-performance, Operator walks through the architecture live: a registry contract, a 1/1 HTML NFT, nine data contracts, and 40 notations generated as SVG from the chain itself. Performance has historically forced an impossible choice: be collected and frozen, or remain alive and unsustained. The Performance Operating System refuses that choice.
Speaker:
Operator (Dejha & Ania) - American artist duo engineering medium-agnostic output, joining environments, technology, and the body. Creators of Human Unreadable (2023), which marked a pivotal moment: a generative art community collecting and transacting choreography.