COVID SYNTHESIS

Our CPPM cohort (2025–2026) is the first generation of performance-making students to train entirely on the far side of this rupture. Durational, in-person, embodied pedagogy — Marina's fast, Gecko's breath-synchronised ensemble work — is not a timeless default but a value reasserted because its opposite became briefly, universally unavailable in 2020.

My reflection on AI and language, “starting to speak, decide, and multiply on its own... we are one of its sites of production, alongside systems that now handle words with more fluency” (Last_WQ), is structurally the same argument Auslander makes about mediatization: once the mediatized term achieves autonomy from the live term against which it was defined, the live term must be defended in explicitly nostalgic, almost polemical terms — the register Dave Grohl uses in 2020, and the register Clarisse's five-day fast-and-silence protocol at MAI implicitly answers.

Worth naming as a sixteenth (or seventeenth) axis in the trajectory chapter's “What Recurred” list: Presence / its mediatized Other — an axis operating underneath her year without being named until now.