Viral Drawings: Transmission BC / QT / AV
(2021)
author(s): Karen Schiff
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition reflects on the drawings I was making at different stages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially they are compared to my long-term practice of making abstract drawings patterned on language, and then they are used to theorize a "poetics of transmission." This framework is discussed in relation both to how the virus is transmitted and to how ideas are created and circulated. Various analytical interpretations of the drawings are considered. At some moments, I treat dots in the drawings like ideas or virus particles; at other moments, the strategies I use for connecting the dots represent the process of generating ideas. The drawings become tools for the "research" of thinking through physical and intellectual contagion.
Soft to the Touch: Performance, Vulnerability, and Entanglement in the Time of Covid
(2021)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
What is the nature of human touch and human contact in contemporary music performance, both in general and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? In a time when bodies must be kept at several meters distance, what comes of works which explicitly call for closeness, physical contact, and sharing? How might these works be interpreted differently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her artistic practice and on her research as part of the project entitled Performing Precarity, which seeks to explore the inherent risks in performance when musicians and audiences are entangled in codependent structures. In light of COVID-19, this exposition attempts to unfold and trace modes of vulnerability in contemporary music performance—from human contact via eye contact and physical touch, to the precarious negotiation of shared space—and to reflect on how such encounters might breed new understandings and knowledge.
HALFLIFE
(2021)
author(s): shasti
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition posits art as a form of contagious divination, a glimpse into the multiplicity of possible futures, and an examination of artists' ability to detect momentum towards unavoidable outcomes.
In 2014, I was selected by curator Heather Pesanti to participate in the City of Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche festival, an overnight public art event spanning twelve hours in multiple neighborhoods that draws over a million people from the surrounding regions.
Spurred by my concerns about the inescapable gravity of mobile electronic media and "viral culture," my work was to be a performance premised on contagion, pointing to the monumental role that electronic media had assumed in mediating our direct experience, and the civic and societal fallout I believed would ensue. Little did I suspect how bizarrely prescient the work would turn out to be.
On October 6th, 2014, one hundred glowing “carriers,” dressed in fluorescent hazmat suits, wearing fluorescent LED-wired helmets in the dodecahedral geometric shape of an adenovirus, dispersed throughout the City of Toronto, each "testing" and “infecting” at least one hundred festivalgoers by marking their faces and hands with “spots” “lesions” and “rashes” using surgical swabs dipped into a beaker of invisible UV-reactive ink. Each "test subject" was then gifted a small UV pen lamp with built-in reactive ink marker and instructed to "infect" and "test" ten others.
It is estimated that HALFLIFE attained an "R-naught" value of ten, and through this performance, affected approximately one hundred thousand people.
Images of the performance went viral on Instagram for seventy-two hours, during which Toronto General Hospital admitted their first and only suspected Ebola case.
Contagiously Wandering Images. Reflecting on Hysteria in and as Artistic Research
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Braun Johanna
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
We seem to be living in hysterical times. Countless reports attest the recent epidemic nature of hysteria, and a simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of media coverage on the infectious virtue of “mass hysteria”, covering almost every aspect of public discussions.
The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this “hysterical discourse”. Countless exhibitions were curated on the topic, (art) journals established, performances and conferences held, festivals organized, articles and essay written. These artistic efforts were also not bound to a specific area and instead spread globally from Australia, China, Canada, India, South Africa, Europe, or the United States, among many others. Hysteria in these current narratives references conspicuously established representations of the hysteric as (public) performer and “Kunstfigur” that extend well beyond the often-referenced European medical studies of the nineteenth century—both into the past and present—and seems to spread uncontrollably through a myriad of artistic practices and public discussions throughout the centuries.Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, and of how those current practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts, is largely pressing on a blind spot.It is the main objective of this exposition to illustrate how the arts seem to bundle the diverse present interests in the contagious nature of hysteria in a multitude of ways, while at the same time bringing to the forefront the century-spanning infectious relationship between hysteria and the (performing) arts, within an artistic and a self-reflexive research practice.