Research Catalogue

Gelatinous Epistemes: Interspecies hydro-choreography and the expanded moving image is a transdisciplinary PHD project in artistic research. The project focuses on the evolving planetary dance between native and emerging species constellations. The background for the project is dramatic ocean change: coastal ecosystems are in the process of adapting to new ocean realities. Fish populations are declining or migrating from their nested ecologies, while the gelatinous migratory ctenophora and jellyfish seem to thrive and continue their cyclical survival choreographies. Marine biological scientists are predicting that the biomass of ctenophores and jellyfish will increase in the ocean, possibly with less biodiversity of other marine species. The project deploys choreography, site-specific video installation and virtual technology to shed light on oceanic forms of communication and emerging ontologies. The project will take place in two climate zones marked by human activity and the migration of the ctenophora (the tempered cold zone of the Oslofjord/NO and the Trondheimsfjord Oslo, as well as in the Arctic coastal zone where the ctenophora might migrate to in the future (Bearalváhki – Berlevåg/ Sápmi – NO). For the final artistic result, synchronization technology will be employed to interweave the research from the different sites into a multichannel video-installation. In the three-dimensional space between screens/projections, the ‘gelatinous episteme’ will be animated through an interactive approach where the viewer is invited to actively explore entangled interspecies worlds.

eferences other people give me

I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work. Much of Janine Antoni's art is about the female body and cultural identity. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time. I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions. Artists, architects and designers give interviews about their work. Amongst them, architects tend to write more and publish more written work in relation to their practice.

Across diverse mediums and form, the ‘human’ body, however transient, remains my main subject of events. What is seen, in the eyes of my mind, take place on surface, lens, material, and morph with one another, with the living moving body, disfiguring each other and reconfiguring themselves after consumption. Embodied and disembodied appearances, reflect on the visceral and urgent presence of the human, live, body. At the start, the notion of mirror: a constant ever-changing image that is formed and deformed as each breath brings life to the body. Different media such as drawing, photography, printmaking, painting, voice, word, sound and video, interrelate with as output a universe of heterogeneous appearances, each with a common denominator: movement of the body and movement of the soul, between the gestural expression of charcoal drawing, the analogue and digital/post-produced sounds, still and moving images, to the carefully crafted and re-elaborated copper plates delivering prints. At the moment these are called Side Effects, each one a bi-product of the previous step in the process of feedback loop. “anthropomorphs”; two dimensional images derived from the superimposition of drawing and moving body (drawing>photo>painting>print) “hesitations”; the more visceral exploration of embodied voice-movement integration, exploring frequencies and resonances of vocal output rooted within the organs of the body “ghosts”; are the anthropomorphs restituted a third dimension. Sculptures rendered independent to move again, suspended in space, relating to nothing but to their history and to one another. “multiplicity”; anonymous portraits overlapped and stop-motion animated, searching to grasp the ever-changing nature of (one)(multiple)self, faced with memory and its loss, ancient stranger twins, imagined encounters or the union of multiplicity as one.

Sound Body is a project created by Zornitsa Stoyanova(BUL/USA) and Peter Sciscioli (USA), with an international cast of artists. The project was created over 8 workshops and rehearsal days in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is a written description of the project done specifically for a Master's degree assignment.

Collaborative filmmaking and the quest for a collective narrative. Through exploring different kinds of collaborators strategies this project embarked on a quest. Is there a way to create a narrative fiktion film that has is a founded in a kind of collective, existential mythology of contemporary life.