(RE)VERB SEA2SKY

After two years on separate journeys, two friends of island origins – Li Hangin, deity of The Air, and LiDagat, deity of The Ocean – finally communicate to each other through a web portal. In weekly back and forth correspondence held in html/css, hyper/text, gif/jpg,mp4/mp3, Lihangin and Lidagat share epic stories of (pre-Covid) travels, guiding alongside their nomadic devotees (Frog & KK). Moving through festivals, pilgrimages, and ephemeral passages of space-time – from the Philippines, UK, India, Taiwan, Mongolia, China and New York – ritual traditions of Dongba Naxi, Mongolian shamanism, Visayan Catholicism, Sri Vijaya Tantra, Chinese folk religion and indigenous syncretism root their metaphysical understanding of more-than-human worlds. Told from the perspective of respective wind and ocean deities, geopolitical relationships between spirit worlds emerge as synchronous with and beyond nation-states. These plural territories become linked in Net Art letters, developing a digital language of intimacy for contemporary media, techno-rituals and (e)bodied knowledges, dancing at the speed of coded eros, late capitalism, and climate change.

CosmiKnots is a network envisioned by Frog and KK to engage embodied entanglements with diverse techno-ecologies. As Asian-American artists traveling between diaspora, their use of text, visual, performance and healing modalities translates roots and borders. Frog’s art practice is informed by studies as a shamanic apprentice and KK’s developed from anthropology, media studies and movement research. As CosmiKnots, they explore biomaterial expressions of spiritual ecologies mediated in the post-digital.