Research Catalogue

WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER is conceptualized and conducted collaboratively by Charlotta Ruth (SE/AT) and Jasmin Schaitl (AT). The starting point are two artistic practices based on methods of mindfulness and game/play; Performances for the Mind and Choreographic Clues. These two individual perspectives on participation emerge from the project leaders’ ongoing artistic research and merge in their common artistic curiosity in the facilitator role and facilitating the creation of immaterial material. Accompanied by neuroscientist and performer Imani Rameses (US/AT) the research asks: How does immaterial material perform within participatory situations? What role does participatory setting play and how does participation differ if situations are communicated as a workshop, a treatment, a practice or a performance? How can neuroscience support how immaterial and participatory art practices are developed and described? What relation exists beyond involvement and how can a participant become the situation rather than being part of a situation? What has to occur in the mind and body for this to happen? Through practice and dialogue conducted with experts in the fields of contemplative sciences, sound art, choreography, game art and somatics, the research explores how input from participants (e.g. memory, thought, emotion) can be placed at the centre of a flexible yet framed performance situation. WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER was realised in collaboration with the Angewandte Performance Laboratory 2021-2022. In the course of the project, a lecture was given at the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education, and a public series was realised at Kunsthalle, Wien & Angewandte Performance Lab. Collaborating expert practitioners and dialogue partners are: Philipp Ehmann (AT), Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), Mariella Greil (AT), Dennis Johnson (US/AT), Anne Juren (FR/AT), Krõõt Juurak (EE/AT), Imani Rameses (US/AT), Christian Schröder (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE/AT).

The subjective experience of time pressure in today’s efficiency- and performance-oriented society is fuelled by a paradox: acceleration is omnipresent due to economic and technological demands, while at the same time complexity and self-responsibility require more time for decisions. This exposition examines individual and institutional ways of dealing with discrepant time demands. Where and how do different age groups experience divergent time regimes that occur simultaneously? Which techniques do individuals and institutions use or invent to synchronize different time perceptions, rhythms, and activities? How can artistic research create asynchronicity and make it experienceable through filmic means? And, finally, to what extent can filmic thinking produce ways of knowing that convey (as yet) unverbalized perceptions of time? Methodologically, this research combines analytical and artistic approaches in an essayistic procedure comprising cinematic practice and writing. On the one hand, it explores different aspects of divergent perceptions of time in a series of case studies under the leitmotif of “asynchronous determinations of time.” Situated in both immaterial and care work, in which bodily and affective temporalities are highly important, these empirical investigations consider the role of lifetime (age, biography, memory) and temporal modes (tempos; imperatives, indicatives, subjunctives). On the other hand, this study develops specific artistic procedures for focusing perception by means of narration, fragmentation, montage, visual and linguistic interventions, extractions and interweavings. Since simultaneous non-simultaneities (tend to) overwhelm subjective experience, the procedures adopted in this research contribute to new forms of filmic thinking and images of thought. They should be understood as an incentive to empathize with different understandings of time.

This public space project is taking place in my local community Sv. Filip i Jakov at the Dalmatian coast in Croatia. It is embedded in artistic research, conducted through the Masters of choreography programme COMMA at Codarts University of the Arts and Fontys Academy of the Arts. Following up my artistic research on the interrelation of space and the human inner world I am investigating what impact a surrounding, in particular the environment of the public space we live in, has on our thinking, feeling, acting, living and ways of being. The purpose of this project is raising awareness about the importance how we shape our common living spaces. In this practice-based research process I am using methods and tools from artistic and academic practices as reflective writing, observation, content analysis, site-specific movement explorations, choreographic tools, interdisciplinary framework, as well as informal methods like dwelling, experiencing and socializing. The outcome of this process is a multilayered context being transferred into an artistic concept. In an unexpected way the artistic creation turned out to be a tool for comprehending not only content and context, but substantially knowing and understanding myself. The results are disseminated as an exhibition with historic and artistic photographies, a site-specific performance, a social event with the local community in the public space of my home village and this written paper.

Table of contents JSS issues

The Grand Tour Experiment: A Transformative Traverse of the Picturesque Landscape was a human-pulled carriage journey that re-envisioned the eighteenth-century traverse of the picturesque landscape, the subject-objectification of the view, and the imperialistic impulse behind the voyage pittoresque. This artistic experiment visually, kinaesthetically, and performatively explored the transformation from landscape to image that formed the basis of modern perception, as part of the colonial legacy inherent within the picturesque view. The Grand Tour carriage was pulled by human labour, evidencing the forced labour economy that impelled the European Enlightenment, while demonstrating in human terms, the use, abuse, and commodification of human and non-human animals. The Grand Tour proceeded from Binche to Brussels to Antwerp, Belgium in 2022. The Grand Tour experiment investigated the eighteenth-century picturesque gaze, which travelled unchecked over the landscape in industrialised Europe, a harbinger of the annexation and enclosure of land that had been commonly owned, traditionally used, or publicly accessible, while portending the colonisation of lands abroad. The picturesque gaze, an imperialist mechanism, still fragments the landscape, excising two-dimensional pictures from the three-dimensional world around us, a vestige and augur of the destruction of lands, cultures, and peoples. Shifting between early modern and contemporary perception, The Grand Tour bisected space and time in a cleaving manoeuvre, creating new fault lines in which multiple planes of space-time might co-exist. This experiment tested whether a new neo-picturesque framework could be forged in a dimension of space-time that alters according to the perception and orientation of the traverser, casting contingent new imaginaries into physical and psychic realms where they may or may not become realities, according to Arno Böhler’s philosophy as artistic research approach (2019). This experiment envisaged a plurality that did not exist in the eighteenth century but may have already been limned in its myriad contradicting, contrasting, and diverging modes of sensing and experiencing the world around us in a relational and now relative notion of space-time. Download Accessible PDF

This exhibition presents an investigation into the folk music and dance practice polska, involving a group of Swedish folk musicians and dancers. The investigation employs optical motion capture (mocap) to explore interactive music and dance performances and create innovative artistic expressions by merging traditional practices with contemporary media technology. As a musician working closely with the dancers he plays for, the author explores ways to mediate dance through the sonification and visualisation of movement data. The focus is on the fundamental connection between sound and movement in this performance practice, particularly showcased in the project's centrepiece, Dancing Dots. Documentations of this and other works included in the exhibition present live music and dance with sonic and visual displays derived from mocap data, asking how such multi-modal mediations can facilitate understanding of the interplay between movement and music and open new avenues for artistic expression in this folk music practice. The use of optical motion capture is contextualised as a means of mediating music-dance through narrow streams of movement data, and the exposition introduces a web tool for accessible sonification of folk dance. The exposition applies music and dance theoretical concepts in designing the movement mediations, examines their relevance in an artistic context, and grounds the results in a practice-based understanding of the rhythmic/metric framework of the Swedish polska. Download Accessible PDF