Alien Intimacy is a work that materialises through the ongoing collaboration between James Batchelor and Zander Porter. It currently exists in the form of a short performance designed for experimental, curated events such as Art Not Apart (Canberra Australia), Fierce Festival (Birmingham UK) and Revis(ualis)ing Intersectionality a performance and discursive event curated by Dr. Tiara Roxanne (Berlin, Germany). This continues to be performed in a range of contexts in 2020. The work is currently being developed further in the context of a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, supported by the Australia Council.  

Zander Porter and James Batchelor, in duet fashion, perform an interrelation in Alien Intimacy. The performance speculates on the movement of an interpersonally constructed alien sensibility where the visible and the invisible or the physically embodied and the virtually disembodied intertwine. The distance between human and alien (or body/self and object/other) expands and contracts as the performers locate themselves in a nearby, inter-netted spacetime when “alien” recalls and navigates away from imageries more essentialized, such as the cinematic extraterrestrial. A speculative choreography proposes new landscapes from console gaming scenography and low-res NASA images. Remembered as a microscopic gravitational force and a magnetic repulsion over the illusory notion of a direct contact, “touch” is macroscopically proportioned in Alien Intimacy, giving over to new senses of (non)touch-touch, the “almost-touchable,” or a “space-in-between.”