Multiplayer - Softenings and Inquiries into Matters of Toxoplasmatic Ectoplasm
(2024)
author(s): Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
This project investigates Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites, which should be approached with the greatest of caution.
Approached as liminal interfaces between the living and the dead, suspended between past(s) and present(s), turning these instruments into both paranormal and parasitic sites, which should be treated as such.
Instruments as pathological contaminated bodies of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you, sedimenting within you and, subsequently, playing you.
Instruments as haunted sites saturated with ghostlike matters of toxoplasmatic ectoplasm, fostering ghosts with the capacity to possess and inflict pain on to other bodies, active in the past as well in the present.
With an interest in the notion of instrumentalization and what instruments can mean, control, and do to bodies, instruments are approached from a safe(r) distance through different (group) interventions, raising questions on how best to emolliate and soften the instrumental body?
How to soften the big silent? How to soften the sedimented?
Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts
(2022)
author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic.
Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.
Tracing ghosts: documenting and conserving the performative
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): sian Hutchings, Samuel Barry
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Can an interpretation behave as a synergy of a performative act through its documentation and its conservation?