Tech Play

Tech Play is a collaborative durational performance and site-responsive installation by Heather Coker Hawkins and Maurice Moore, documented through video and sound recording. Created for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center’s 2025 {Re}HAPPENING event, the project exists simultaneously as live event and as mediated artifact, emphasizing how time-based performance circulates, mutates, and persists through documentation.

The work draws from the temporal experiments of Black Mountain College, engaging John Cage’s attention to silence and duration, Merce Cunningham’s chance operations, and practices of deep listening and sound walking. Movement unfolds through improvisational scores shaped by environmental conditions, while found sound from the site becomes compositional material. Video documentation does not function as neutral record, but as an active re-choreographing of time—framing stillness, repetition, interruption, and disappearance. Editing, camera position, and sound capture generate new temporal cycles that extend the performance beyond its original duration. Tech Play positions technology—projection, light, fog, and responsive media—as a collaborator that complicates authorship and spectatorship. The documentation captures moments of audience participation, hesitation, and play, revealing how public space conditions engagement and how performance invites risk and curiosity. In translating the work to a digital platform, the project examines what is preserved, altered, or lost when embodied experience becomes mediated. This piece reflects on documentation as a form of performance in itself, aligning with Black Mountain College’s interdisciplinary legacy by treating video, sound, and text as parallel sites of experimentation. Through its digital afterlife, Tech Play explores cyclical time not as linear record, but as recurrence, echo, and reactivation.

These intense visual essays request that the reader slow down and embrace the physicality of reading, as opposed to gliding over the predictability of an automaton text tattooing a screen. The on-going effort constitutes an opportunity to experiment with many types of expressive tactile materials and the depth of a blank page—the page as a net fit to capture the infinite complexities of American experience. 

Maurice Moore, Ph.D. is a first-generation Black and nonbinary scholar, artist, performer, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice moves across drawing, performance, visual poetry, and sound. Grounded in Black and nonbinary ways of knowing, Moore’s work explores mark-making as embodied research, using euphoria, dysphoria, and numbphoria as critical strategies. Their practice—often articulated through the ongoing project Drawing While Black—treats drawing as a performative, relational act that collapses boundaries between studio, stage, and classroom. Moore is the author of Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol. 1 (Versal Journal, 2022), winner of the Amsterdam Open Book Prize, a book of visual poems investigating queer mark-making as a site of resistance and possibility. Since 2011, Moore’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues including the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London, UK; Calabar Gallery in New York, NY; the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, CA; the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC; Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC; and the Modern Art Museum Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, Korea.

Heather Coker Hawkins is a filmmaker, choreographer, and educator who serves as Program Head for the Graduate Certificate in Screendance at the University of Utah. Her work spans performance, screendance, video installation, and immersive media, with screenings at the Portland Film Festival, Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and Conference in Austria, and exhibitions at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. Her creative research explores mediated attention, embodied spectatorship, and audience well-being, investigating how moving images and spatial environments shape perception, physical presence, and emotional experience. Working across artistic disciplines and media, she approaches collaboration and authorship as evolving processes shaped by depth, duration, and multiple perspectives, creating space for discoveries that emerge through the exchange of artistic, critical, and technological knowledge.