Don't Blink

Don't Blink (A Rehearsal for War) is an ongoing performance project centered on the drone, tracing how it moves through supply chains, how its gaze travels through images and networks, and how bodies rehearse living under it.

The project began from a paranoia about a future war that has not happened yet. Rather than imagining that war from scratch, Cuixi looks for pieces of it already embedded in ordinary life.

In Shenzhen, she traced consumer drones backward from images on screens into their commercial lives. In electronics markets, parts that could later enter a battlefield still sit as ordinary goods, surrounded by people worrying about business and the next opportunity.

The drone's gaze moves in another direction. Footage can leave an operator, enter a platform, pass through networks and algorithms, and arrive in someone else's hand within seconds.

Don't Blink rehearses this distance through performance. Across different studies, Cuixi works with analog FPV cameras, machine vision, simulated aerial landscapes, live feeds, and her own body, asking how to hide, change shape, watch, and be watched under the drone's eye.

The current online iteration turns these questions into a vertical feed on audiences' phones, where a visibly fabricated future war begins to mix live transmission, simulation, past traces, and imagined future.