Dispositions of Being-With: Redistributing Heterogeneity among the Concert Audience
(2025)
author(s): Kelvin King Fung Ng
published in: Research Catalogue
The concert setting, as standardised through the worldwide prevalence of Western Classical music, offers a unique condition in which audience members from various backgrounds coexist in the same time and space, and are prompted to act and interact, restrictedly yet often intensely, by attending and orienting themselves to a medium frequently marked by its intangibility and ineffability. Despite such a richly layered social practice, existing musical works that aim to bring about divergent models of communion tend to eschew this listening convention, rather than harnessing the aforementioned characteristics to unleash new forms of togetherness.
My artistic research seeks to instigate such novel social configurations by creating musical works that articulate previously unexposed relationships among concert audience members. Through factoring in their differing preconditions relative to the performance, my works aim to redistribute what can be sensed by whom (Rancière 2004).
Grounded in a pragmatist view of music-listener co-articulation, I introduce the concepts of circumscribed and preferred affordances. Their dynamics at work are examined through pieces that resonate with my approach, including und als wir (1993) by Mathias Spahlinger and Quadraturen V (2000) by Peter Ablinger. These help illuminate my strategies in redistributing the sensible while motivating intersubjective awareness, as exemplified in D!V£R#!M&NT! (2024) and Brief Version of Seoljanggu (2021–), which configure heterogeneous sets of affordances in relation to individual and cultural differences. Knowledge and experiences generated through this endeavour aim to deepen our understanding of the intricate intersubjectivities of listening, while also opening new routes for broader reflections on the social dimensions of human relations.
CRITICAL PLAYGROUND AS PLAY-CE UTOPIA. (MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENCE IN ITSELF.)
(2023)
author(s): Anartist
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.