/A hybrid practice of
body,
space,
sound,
language,
shaped by grief, ancestral memory
informed by
critical systems thinking, Taoist poetics
When grief collapses a world model, how does the body rebuild its knowing — and what does it mean to stand with what is disappearing?
My work constructs hybrid cognitive fictional environments — spatial, sonic, bodily — as experimental sites where grief and its related knowing processes become perceptible and transformable through the structured states of not-knowing. It is a self-enacted ontology.
Dan Su (su dance110) is a Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist, composer, and author with roots in Yunnan, China. As a thinker-practitioner, Su constructs hybrid environments as cognitive fictions in which the threshold body becomes a critical site of knowledge and transformation through its encounter with machine-mediated systems. Tracing structural violence and ancestral memory, their work explores grief as an embodied form of epistemic inference across sound, voice, text, performance, and installation.
Dark Twisted Mind (2020–2021) marked an entry point — systemic violence rendered as an interactive architecture of complicity, in which audience participation became the mechanism of inquiry. From there, Gentle Brutality (2021) expanded into performance-opera, tracing how bodies traverse dispossession through metal-machine structures, movement, and sound. Shang Can (2024) turned inward — a solo sonic inquiry into fractured ancestral memory landscape and invented vocals. TRANCEFACIAL (2025) constructs mobile grief temples, threshold architectures that bridge toward the forthcoming 7-3 Trilogy — an expanded work across performance, music, and the experimental fiction book 7-3-R One Day Flight. A continuing (r)evolution.
Su brings together over fifteen years of movement and somatic practice, holding an MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Berlin and Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, alongside a PhD in quantitative methodology in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Their sonic compositional language — threshold-based invented vocals layered over electronic textures derived from material, spatial, site-specific, and movement-informed contexts — received the German Record Critics Award in Electronic and Experimental music and was shortlisted for the Giga-Hertz Production Award at ZKM in 2025. Su’s work has been presented internationally at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Sanatorium of Sound Festival), Kunsthaus Bethanien (CTM Festival, Berlin), Forum Frohner (Donaufestival, Krems Austria), Staatsoper Berlin (Orpheus Festival), Lusvardi Art (Milan and Kiel), and residency at Vorbrenner (Innsbruck, Austria), and through site-specific works across Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Their research has been supported by Gwaertler Stiftung, Neustart Kultur Rechercheförderung, the DAAD Stipendium, and the American Educational Research Association.
The body is an epistemic system — constantly updating its model of the world through sensation, perception, action, and recursion. It is both highly situated and fundamentally inferential. Grief, in this framework, is not merely an emotion but a collapse of that model: the moment when prediction fails, when the world the body knew can no longer be assumed. What I call embodied epistemic inference draws on contemporary cognitive science, predictive processing, active inference, and affective neuroscience, where Bayesian updating provides the mechanism through which prediction errors are integrated and updated. These fields redefine cognition as a dynamic inference process distributed across body, environment, and experience. While existing research addresses model updating as a continuous background process, grief as a specific catastrophic collapse and its role as the activating condition for conscious epistemic rebuilding remains largely unaddressed. This research proposes that grief is not merely a response to loss but a necessary disruption that forces the inferential system into active reconstruction, producing an updated consciousness capable of directing decision making in reality. In my artistic practice — what i call Cognitive Fictions — sound, invented vocal language, mechanical structures, spatial architectures, and experimental writing function as the enaction of the mechanisms of inference — modular systems that can be shifted, collapsed, reorganized, and transformed. Like a living architecture, each element remains reconfigurable, allowing grief to become perceptible and navigable rather than fixed or resolved. The enactor is situated within the system itself, inhabiting its multiple layers and dimensions in resonance with principles of second order cybernetics. This approach explores how humans learn, infer, and reorganize meaning in the aftermath of loss. It is also informed by the writings of Zhuangzi, whose cosmological view of grief as continuous transformation points toward the transcendence this practice ultimately moves toward. It is a practice of continuously rewriting world models through situated sonic inference, embodied belief updating, and spatial enactment — wandering through loss, rebuilding knowing from within the collapse. (Last updated: March 15th 2026)
* conceptual authorship
The conceptual vocabularies in my work — terms, systems, and frameworks — are developed through lived research and experience from rupture, displacement, and grief. This includes but is not limited to: Cognitive Fictions, embodied epistemic inference, Acoustic Movies, and Sonic Mourning (documented and developed since 2021).
I welcome resonance and dialogue, yet I ask that these ideas be engaged as part of an ongoing exchange. When curators, writers, or collaborators draw from these frameworks, I invite the credit to remain relational: to acknowledge the shared process and the original context from which the language arose.
If you wish to use, cite, or build upon these frameworks in published or public contexts, please contact me directly.