When the mocap suit drifts, the drift becomes choreography

The player is bad at the game on purpose. In act one of Letta Shtohryn's Чули? Чули / Chuly? Chuly, staged as an e-sports spectacle, someone plays in public and keeps failing to reach the objective, while competing voices narrate a story about a woman who once saw giants. The cave is never found. The giants never appear. That's the design: a narrative coherent enough to believe and unstable enough to resist checking.

The work starts somewhere unexpected—the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a 5,000-year-old underground temple in Malta that was unsealed in 1902 and promptly filled up with urban legends about giant skulls. Shtohryn, who is Ukrainian, traces the line from that kind of speculation to the industrialized version: the woman's account gets run repeatedly through LLM agents until it mirrors the half-truths-and-real-history blend that Pekka Kallioniemi catalogues in Vatnik Soup. The e-sports framing isn't decoration either. It points at where radicalization actually happens, which is game chat.

In act Two, a dancer calibrates an inertial motion capture suit facing the audience—a technical necessity that plays as a stare-down—and then the suit's calibration begins to drift, as those suits always do under electromagnetic interference. Shtohryn treats that drift as choreography. The gap that opens between the body and the avatar it drives is the whole thesis: the single operator behind a thousand accounts, briefly visible. Then dancer and player swap suit for controller, and the player becomes a calibrated NPC while the dancer takes the camera and decides what the world shows you.

Killscreen has long argued that broken machines are expressive ones—Small Radios Big Televisions found its beauty in magnetic tape degrading. Chuly? Chuly takes the next step and makes the error tell you who's holding the strings. It took an Honorary Mention in New Animation at Prix Ars Electronica 2024, and it showed through August 14 in Avatars, Monsters, {Robots}, Ghosts, Shtohryn's solo exhibition at Valletta Contemporary—back in Malta, where the giants started.