The body is technology. The most ancient, the most democratic, the most universally shared.
Performance art has long carried a structural problem. Every preservation model leans on something outside the work: a foundation that outlives the artist, a body that remembers, a certificate in custody, a chain that breaks when someone forgets.
Operator built a different answer. The Performance Operating System is an open on-chain architecture that holds every parameter needed to regenerate a live performance: choreography, music, notation, costume, motion data, conservation manual. The performance can happen again indefinitely, without the artists, without an institution, without permission.

Repeat as necessary is its first instantiation. A 31-minute ritual guiding audience-participants through collective nervous-system states: threshold, entrainment, dissolution, return. Premiered in Bodrum in 2025 with seven dancers, it uses repetitive movement, breath, and tuned sound frequencies until the bodies of audience and performer sync.
The system's registry contract indexes nine data contracts. A 1/1 HTML NFT fires events, assembles state, and renders the architecture live. The artist’s voice lives on-chain, prompting dancers. A charcoal afterimage tracks presence across 40 formations. When a wallet holds one token from each chapter, entrainment is achieved, and the artwork shifts state.

This is Operator's second architecture for choreographic preservation and transactability. The first, the Operator Generative Choreography Method (2023), encoded movement. The Performance Operating System encodes everything a live performance depends on.
This work refuses the impossible choice performance has historically forced: be collected and frozen, or remain alive and unsustained. Repeat as necessary can be restaged anywhere by anyone; that openness makes ownership meaningful. What is collected is not documentation of a past performance but an engine for future ones. The system is the work.

Artist: Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti)
Artwork: choreography and performance concept: Ania Catherine
Performance operating system concept & design, notation system, visual art: Dejha Ti
Engineering and additional system design: Isaac Patka
Music and composition: Ryat
Costume design: Don Aretino
Design assistants: Caro Oliva, Mackenzie Stover
Motion capture post-production: Harriet Davey

Premiere performance: Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası 
Dancers: Halil İbrahim Akgün, Selim Cizdan, Alara Erdem, Ufuk Fakıoğlu, İlayda İpekçi, Gizem Seçkin, Diren Ezgi Yıldızkan
Director of photography: Cenk Karacalar
Event production: Code Zero Media 
Curator: HOFA
Premiere Venue: Scorpios Bodrum

Repeat as necessary: Performance Operating System, in the collection of Hivemind Digital Culture Fund.

Operator (US), (est. 2016), is the artist duo of Ania Catherine, a choreographer and performance artist, and Dejha Ti, a multimedia artist and technologist. The practice develops critical and conceptual approaches to experience, engineering medium-agnostic work that joins environments, technology, and the body. On View, (SCAD Museum of Art, 2019), opened an ongoing inquiry into privacy and extractive technologies; Human Unreadable (2023-2026) introduced on-chain generative works that made choreography collectable; Repeat as necessary (2025-2026) built the Performance Operating System, an architecture holding everything required to regenerate a live performance, indefinitely. Awards: 2 Lumen Prizes, Prix Ars Electronica, ADC Gold Cube, S+T+ARTS, MediaFutures.

Operator’s Repeat as necessary proposes a quiet inversion: technology appears not as an external layer, but as circuitry already inscribed in the body. Framed as a Performance Operating System, the work treats performance and its system as one organism, designed from the outset to be both experience and infrastructure. Every parameter needed to regenerate the piece—notations, frequencies, costumes, choreographic directions, even intended nervous-system states—lives permanently across a network of smart contracts on-chain and open for access. Despite a conceptual density that occasionally risks overdetermining the viewer/participant's experience, it articulates a powerful proposition: digital systems can serve as vessels for the shared preservation of lived presence, human memory, and collective sensation. Ultimately, the blockchain serves not as a ledger of ownership, but as a functional engine for future reactivation in a more resilient art eco-system.