Nothingness in the digital Space
(2024)
author(s): Valerie Messini
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Valerie Messini (Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture) chooses the phenomenon of emptiness in art as a point of departure for her contribution "Nothingness in the digital Space" and presents her artistic projects operating with different technologies to approach the phenomenon of emptiness in connection with corporeality in digital space. "1-NO1-100.000" uses dance movement to explore emptiness in virtual space, and "Deep Empty - Wide Open" uses deep learning to question the extent to which horizon lines function as mental voids.
How to stay alive?
(2023)
author(s): Man Huen Christy Ma
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This research exposition is part of my MA research in Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research in Theater Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki and Goethe University. The other part is the artistic work “how are we still alive here? what about there?” consisting of a performance and exhibition which took place in Studio 1, Theater Academy in February 2023. The research is a response as well as an investigation on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on contemporary dance, how it affects my corporeality and my creative process in consideration to changes in spectatorship in the mediatized post-pandemic society. The literature review is an exploration of how different disciplines of knowledge intersect with my artistic practice, this exposition is best to be viewed along the artistic part for a better understanding.
in the flesh
(2021)
author(s): Virpi Nieminen
published in: Research Catalogue
In this exposition I reflect on an artistic research project I conducted from fall 2020 through spring 2021, as a student of scenography in Aalto University.
The base for the artistic research project was the idea of corporality, touch, flesh, materiality and aesthetics as something excessive and peripheral in the context of the Aalto University campus. I explored bodily excesses by working with sculptural objects formed by bodycasting, a method that produces a surplus of bodyparts. I was also interested in the process of working with my hands, and working through touching and being with the sculptural objects and materials.
As the process evolved the questions came to circulate around the issues of knowledge and the unknown. What kind of knowledge can working with these objects and materials lead me toward? Can that knowledge be articulated into language? How to work with things that language doesn't reach?
The research project was executed aside the peripheries in parallax: BRAVE NEW PERIPHERIES -conference organised by the four-year “Floating Peripheries – mediating the sense of place” artistic research project.
Moving through the double vortex
(2017)
author(s): Jan Schacher, Patrick Neff
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Music, when performed live, carries the musician's physicality with it, either embedded within the sound or perceivable through the musician's physical presence. A dancer's movement follows dynamics and expresses shapes that are based on musical phrasing principles and 'kinetic melodies'. The two pieces 'Double Vortex' for trombone, movement, and live-electronics and 'Moving Music' for interactive dance and electronic sounds represent experimental devices for exploring the relationships between musical actions and movement, sound and space, and between instrumental and embodied performance modes. With physical tasks and movement components added to open-form, improvised, and compositional work, the otherwise tacit and taken for granted contributions of the performer's corporeal presence is brought to the foreground. By putting the dancer into the role of an instrumentalist and by setting the trombone player into movement, the intrinsic musicality of movement and the dependence between dance and music is shown. By linking sound and movement in both the corporeal and the technological domains, a shifted relationship is established that generates forms of interaction particular to this specific practice. The work on the two pieces is carried out with a focus on artistic creation, and in parallel becomes the object for observation, trace interpretation, and analysis from the perspective of art as research. The exposition further thematises the methods of trace collection and analysis, as well as the making of maps, diagrams, and assemblages, and addresses the scope of this secondary discursive format. In a movement that goes from media trace to text to sketch, from descriptive to contextual to associative juxtaposition, the exposition speculates about – rather than claims to generate – insights and understanding on corporeality in technologically mediated music and dance performances.
Co-relation that is not – photography and coming into the materiality
(2015)
author(s): Ari Kakkinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Sure a photograph can be divided in its mental image and its image-object. These kind of duals follow our tradition, our metaphysics.
When we rather think our corporeality as becoming to or becoming of the corpus instead of the separation of the mind and the body, we can or we even have to think the same way with photography, which traditionally has been located in-between of the nature and the culture.
This essay aims at figuring out the question of the materiality of a photograph when we have to think otherwise than with the difference between mind and body, inside and outside etc. The text argues that the ”material core” is not the origin of the materiality of the photograph, but that the essential center appears only as a trace. Instead of referring to a distant object or a distant instant the trace is the distance itself, its differing and deferring.
The materiality of the photograph consists of its materialities. In a way it is like our bodies are – actual and real, partly serving us, yet also mute and unresponsive, giving the possibility of being. Being itself, becoming.
Körper
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Hanns Holger Rutz, David Pirrò
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Process of creating a new sound piece around questions of algorithmic bodies.
Gecomponeerde uitvoerders : het musicerende lichaam vanuit compositorisch perspectief
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Paul Craenen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The music-performing body fulfills an essential role in the creation of new instrumental compositions. However, its presence is rarely the primary concern of compositional thinking. With most musical experimentation, the music-making body keeps a self-evident function as a transparent medium for musical ideas, but also as a limitation on the potential for musical exploitation. Recent artistic and theoretical developments invite a rethink of the compositional potential of the music-performing body. Focus on the music-making body and the physicality of the music experience has intensified in recent decades. A body paradigm is becoming audible and visible in the work of a generation of young composers, as well as in musicological research. The micro-temporality of physical gesture and instrumental timbre have become key points of interest. In the micro-temporal space, physical presence is unveiled as a very direct interactive ability of the performer or improviser but also as a 'bodily thinking' of the composing body. Based on recent scientific insights and both historical and recent music examples, Paul Craenen develops a concept of 'intercorporeality' that sheds new light on the relationship between music performers, composers and music consumers.
And hand, and index, and manual: ongoing explorations of my online choreographies in conjunction with my evolving research.
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Renee Carmichael
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I have been wanting to start this project for awhile, but I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t have the right connection. But then I started reading “Fenomenología del Fin: Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi—(My first experience reading a theoretical book completely in Spanish, a point that is not to be put aside as something decoded—ah ha!—but to be anded into the conversation, the experience and the process. For me it is already a liminal starting point of not only a new life in Buenos Aires after arriving around 6 weeks ago, but also a new type of conjunción in my research)—and I realised that I did not need a connection. And what now?
The idea here will be to explore my own movements surrounding my research as I read it and process it and note it and write it and digitise it. This very current month, whatever month you find yourself reading this text, I am starting a PhD in Teoría Comparada de las Artes at Universidad Nacional de Tres Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My topic is around dance and code. I won’t go into details, and anyway, they will probably change depending on what month you are in. Instead I will say that I want to get to the body. To the dance AND to the code there is always a body to be explored.
I am not exactly sure what shape this will take. What I can say now is that I plan to record my movements while thinking through them with the very theories that I am reading. Every once and awhile I might make a connection, a code that can be used for you readers, to also understand, or better yet—use. But the point is more in the exploration, in the conjunctions.
From what I incorporated, conjuncted, from the Spanish and the introduction of Berardi’s book, with the digital, we are moving away from a liminal world of conjunctions, empathic understanding, and instead find ourselves in connections, or clear codes of communication in structures of syntax. This changes the way we perceive the world, which includes our aesthetic sensibility and our emotional sensitivity. Have we lost our ability to experience that which cannot be said, that which is liminal, that which cannot be understood, that which cannot be codified, that which has no syntax, that which can only be felt? And in a very general sense, my research is asking a similar question. It is bringing back the idea of the body as a way of resisting flows of technological power through the conjunction of dance and code. And so why now?
I have often said, in understandable syntax to describe ideas that perhaps only make sense to me, that I often interalise a theory. I make it experience and then I use it to write. I also say I am interested in exploring the liminal. But I always go back to codifying it, to describing it, to writing it. I will of course have to do that to complete the PhD. There is a system in place after all and this system requires a specific syntax. However, here is my chance to remain in the liminal and in the conjunction and in the body as much as possible in order to process the things I am reading, writing and researching in new ways, with my aesthetic sensibility AND my emotional sensitivity.
And let’s see where it goes.
Valerie Messini (Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture) chooses the phenomenon of emptiness in art as a point of departure for her contribution "Nothingness in the digital Space" and presents her artistic projects operating with different technologies to approach the phenomenon of emptiness in connection with corporeality in digital space. "1-NO1-100.000" uses dance movement to explore emptiness in virtual space, and "Deep Empty - Wide Open" uses deep learning to question the extent to which horizon lines function as mental voids.open exposition comments (0)
This research exposition is part of my MA research in Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research in Theater Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki and Goethe University. The other part is the artistic work “how are we still alive here? what about there?” consisting of a performance and exhibition which took place in Studio 1, Theater Academy in February 2023. The research is a response as well as an investigation on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on contemporary dance, how it affects my corporeality and my creative process in consideration to changes in spectatorship in the mediatized post-pandemic society. The literature review is an exploration of how different disciplines of knowledge intersect with my artistic practice, this exposition is best to be viewed along the artistic part for a better understanding.open exposition comments (0)
Process of creating a new sound piece around questions of algorithmic bodies.open exposition comments (0)