Kordae Jatafa Henry’s work makes the broad framework of “technology” feel unstable, even fragile. His films contain the motifs we readily recognize as technological: rendered environments, motion capture, industrial machinery, satellites, extraction infrastructure. The longer I sit with them, the more difficult it becomes to locate technology exclusively within those objects. What is technology? My mind moves backward from these contemporary motifs to the ancient Greek concept of technē, where skilled knowing and making encompasses what we now separate into art, craft, and technique¹. That historical definition seems to muddle and contest our present understanding of technology. Its foundational definition is already bound to knowledge, to making, and the body in its rawest state.
Henry’s own relationship to making sits inside this longer history. He speaks about an interest in spiritual landscapes and belief systems alongside an inherited impulse toward engineering. His grandfather built cars; his father built cars and houses. He describes himself as coming from “trajectories of rebuilding, building, deconstructing, designing, engineering.” Architecture, animation, sound, mythology, and machinery bleed into his work without acquiring the binary distinctions we often place between these fields. In his work, he continually redirects attention toward the body. The body that navigates, builds, performs, senses, and translates information. A machine permits extensions of those capacities, but it does not invent them.
We have grown accustomed to “armatures that extend from our body”, he says, they help us move through the world. GPS is one. Before GPS, there were stars. Before contemporary positioning systems, sound itself could orient the body toward a destination. The sequence is striking. It breaks the assumption that technological development begins with the machine². Henry describes a consequence of dependance on these armatures; “the more skilled your hand is in terms of the technology, potentially the more your senses dull because you rely on the form of technology”. Each system reorganizes a relationship that already existed between a body and its surroundings.
In Earthworks (2020), the work uses motion capture to connect a flex performer to the Black Knight satellite as a digital avatar. Movement originating in a physical body enters a computer-generated environment, outputting rendered movement. In the work, the virtual world cannot be separated from the body producing it. The computer-generated image remains dependent on a body, and carries traces of gesture, rhythm, muscle — flesh produces data. Data produces another body; the two remain attached through performance. This is a co-dependency. The performer operates the system, but the system gives the performer another scale, and a virtual avatar to live through.
This relationship has a longer history within Henry’s practice. In discussing Earth Mother, Sky Father (2018), he introduces a scale to the relationship between body and technology. The tools that extend our bodies are themselves made from extracted matter. Rare-earth minerals become commodified, we see resources transformed into components used to construct devices, and our devices eventually disappear into the intimacy of everyday use. A phone can function almost like an necessary organ while concealing the land, labor, and political conditions that make that intimacy possible. Henry places the two realities beside one another, “We use this tech every single day, but there are also people dying over the tech.”
He continues by describing the Black body as “a force of technology through history,” implicated within agriculture, infrastructure, and other forms of labor through which material worlds are built. Henry suggests that what remains after histories of forced labor and alienation, may be carried through stories, music, movement, and other forms that could survive displacement.
Henry speculates that conditions of radical understanding and knowledge might produce new formal structures, or even informal structures of ways to imagine futures. His work does not seem interested in futurity as escape, or in abandoning the conditions of the present for a cleaner imagined future. He treats speculation as a way of reorienting. “We are really good at telling post-apocalyptic worlds,” he says. “We are really good at telling the story of the end, but many of us want to tell the story of how we survive and how it begins.” Survival, in this sense, is a method for reorganizing the present before it calcifies. Henry asks how to convey “the most radical, most sensitive, most loving, most ambitious view of the world with the tools that I have.” The future in his work is never detached from the body as the first tool, or material limits. It has to be built from what is already here. If a future changes the technologies people use without changing how they sense or relate to the world, Henry seems unconvinced that we have imagined very far.
His interest in sensing therefore extends beyond the five senses typically privileged as evidence. Henry spoke of a “sixth sense,” an ability to tune oneself toward feelings or ways of knowing that remain difficult to quantify. Music becomes important because it makes this kind of transmission difficult to reduce to information alone. Henry describes music as material, despite its inability to be contained in the same way as an object. “I don’t think music replaces feeling,” he tells me. “I think music allows us to embody the world itself through our own skin and through our own presence.” Across his films, sound alters the physical condition of an image. It can make a rendered environment acquire weight. Henry eventually returns to this thought, perhaps music “makes the image physical.”
Perhaps this is why survival appears so often in his thinking. Throughout his work, continuity depends on transformation. He asks whether memory is flattened when we try to preserve it, or whether transformation itself might be part of how memory survives.
The body was already technological because it was already in relation: to other bodies, to landscape, to inherited knowledge, and to materials. Henry’s work considers what happens when contemporary machines enter relationships, and whose worlds are made possible through construction. He calls this a form of alchemy, with the work itself taking on the role of a trickster. It occupies the contradictions of technology, extending our senses while changing them, and using instability to ask what forms of survival can be possible within the systems we inherit.
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Conducted & Written by Isabel Lotus
All images courtesy of Kordae Jatafa Henry.
Explore Kordae's work: jatafa.com/BIO
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