We Invite You To Sleep With Us
(2024)
author(s): Kimey Peckpo
published in: Research Catalogue
As a child my father sung me to sleep with folk songs weaving pain, desire and death. This milieu was comforting and his circumstantial act (not a decision) shaped my sense that songs are a technology of meaning. Is meaning a word for perceiving the story with ourselves as a part of it? Plato told a story about how the dialectic will separate us from becoming a part of the cosmos. F. Scott Fitzgerald told a similar story about a man bound to an idealised concept of beauty who cannot find his way back to the cosmos of feeling. He cannot emerge into the pragmatism of what Catherine Malabou calls the “one life only”. A N Whitehead describes this as the event of the past emerging into the present into the future. Using song, I speculatively invite attendees to experience meaning inside the event.
As a researcher drawn to Barad’s ideas of the intra-relational, I feel stories are the cosmos expressing itself. In stories, as with Plato’s Republic, we can accidentally describe the problem. Fred Moten is clear on how maintaining a reciprocal assemblage methodology in the lyric creates an ability to “stay with the problem”,
“Let’s call it the scene of empathy. Lets call it the hesitant sociological scene. The scene of the in calculable rhythm. It is a scene neither of subjection nor objection. Looking with this hearing is a kind of building with or bearing.” (2017)
My research, along the song lines of Whitehead, Moten, Deleuze and Guattari et al, has arrived in the region of singing in academia. I enjoy the irony of Katherine Rundell concluding in her essay in defence of books that when you make them inaccessible to a child,
“you cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years… To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a stupidity for which we should not be forgiven.”
We Invite You To Sleep With Us because my father’s songs were a gateway to the somatic experience of sleeping, a region where we are once more a part of.
Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making.
(2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
Some works and their afterlife
(2018)
author(s): Mika Elo
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition I present a cluster of works with regard to their subtle interconnections, often not consciously constructed or intended in any particular ways at the time of their conception. The afterlife of these works, however, enact aesthetic intra-actions of their ensemble. Shedding light on some parts of this cavernous network of pressing matters I make an attempt of explicating the ways in which artistic thinking might get "diffracted" into many part-processes that are both divergent and entangled. In the course of my presentation, I try to be sensitive towards the fact that these strings of thinking are distributed in a complex manner across the divide of sensibility and intelligibility. In terms of the chosen approach this implies avoiding the use of discursive explanations as the main medium of explication. This "method", if it can be formalized as one, involves priorizing the material circumstances of particular articulations, both verbal and non-verbal, over content-oriented gestures of translation.
Thinking by Singing/ Singing by Thinking, or The art of Performing Translation through Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s concept of Acting-Intuition
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The aim of this paper is to present a performative encounter between a singing/thinking voice and the Japanese philosophical concept of Acting-Intuition proposed by Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945), founder of the Kyoto School (of Japanese Philosophy) around 1913. Departing from a vocal investigation of French composer Michel Lambert’s Leçons de Ténèbres (ca. 1664), the performer follows the thoughts crystallizing in the very act of singing. This intuitive act complies to Nishidas view of “our active engagement with our surroundings” and “never just the passivity of pure reception” (Krummel 2015:87). In the act of singing the singer and song are shaped along with the shaping of space itself. Thus, while singing a song and a space the singer is acted upon by both space and the song. In this way, acting-intuition proves to be a concrete mode of human existence in the world’s dynamism, providing a non-dual platform for determining human living. In the process of singing in a space along with an audience, the listeners are involved in the intuitive act and as well as in the translation process of incorporating ‘the other’ as well as “developing one’s identity” (Bouso 2016:112) The thinking by singing can thus be regarded as an experience of translating and transporting meaning from one place to another. Acting-Intuition can also be used a philosophical tool, for reminding us to “rethink our own linguistic categories, to reflect on ourselves at the same time as we reflect on others” (Bouso 2016:113). Applying Acting-Intuition as an artistic research methodology, might perhaps even help us re-envisioning a sense of trust and an “eternal link among all living beings, all beings in their aliveness, this shared transience, and the possibilities for renewal that follow downsfall”, allowing us to “facing the im/possibilities of living on a damaged planet” (Barad 2017:75).
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.open exposition comments (0)
in progress...open exposition comments (0)