Performing Precarity
(2024)
author(s): Laurence Crane, Anders Førisdal, LEA Ye Gyoung, Io A. Sivertsen, Lisa Streich, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.
Personal and Academic Blurred Spaces Hinged on Synchronous Gravities in Nature: Conceptual Musings from Events of (Re-)configurations during COVID-19 Pandemic
(2023)
author(s): Haris Adhikari
published in: Research Catalogue
This paper inquires into a two-fold issue: (i) blurred personal and academic spaces during the pandemic and their impact, and (ii) nature’s role in them. As a transformative arts-based research (TABR) within an experimental framework deploying concepts of liminality, Derrida’s ‘teleiopoiesis’, and an adapted outlook of experiential interconnectedness or consciousness of Advaita Vedanta, the paper forwards pedagogically useful findings and implications as these: (i) blurred spaces as bizarre or third space entities that were both stressful and productive, (ii) increased exposures to nature and eco-spirituality, followed by heightened realizations of nature’s place in life, learning and being during the pandemic, (iii) heterotopic university as a space or place that effectuated a surge in self-internalization of learning via intense involvement, (iv) compassionate/ empathic living as a door to self-improvement and joy, (v) formations of new habits and routines as coping strategies in the difficult times, and (v) newly formed wholesome habits and synchronous gravities in nature as great contributors to increased reflective or creative productivity during the pandemic. Additionally, yet more importantly, it highlights the instrumentality of human senses as lower rungs in realizing the interconnectedness or consciousness that experiential Advaita proffers, and this it does by communicating the need for individually unique, radically nonlinear, and adventurously inter-/ trans-disciplinary celebrations of the phenomenon. Besides, it celebrates interrelated questions and curiosities throughout.
Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Being and Feeling (Alone, Together)
(2023)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
What "moves" in an exhibition, if not the bodies of artists, audiences, and objects? How does conversation move us? What can speculative artistic research offer? This exposition, "Being & Feeling (Alone Together),” held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2020, is part of my doctoral research project, “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” While some aspects of the project (including the title), were developed before the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the project unfolds in relation to myriad cultural, spatiotemporal, and civic situations that the pandemic produced. This situation required experimental and responsive curatorial methods that encouraged the project to move in unexpected ways.
[This exposition corresponds to Section Seven: Letting Things Move in the printed dissertation.]
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.
SAR 2021 presentation - Dawn Woolley
(2022)
author(s): Dawn Woolley, Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
published in: SAR Conference 2020
What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.
Corona Influentia och den mörkare materian
(2021)
author(s): Timo Menke
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my practice as an artist, I constantly return to the dark agency of cosmic and (micro)biological matter. I explore how it may transform, “infect” or enter into symbiotic relationships, that are linguistic, visual, and trans-material in the spirit of Karen Barad. The aim of my work is to offer an outline of what I refer to as a dark enlightenment, by using the ontological and epistemological discourses that humans are entangled in. This text is a manuscript for a performance lecture about bats, viruses, and dark matter, illuminated by a Corona inside Plato’s cave. Similar to and in contrast with the microscopic size of the virus, the pandemic is not here understood as the ultimate disaster, but rather as a footnote in a much vaster narrative that involves a manifold of associated phenomena, related to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject. From the view point of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and hauntology, the virus may be capable of hiding future consequences that dwell in our darkened contemporary world. In short, the manuscript may be understood as a contribution to the dark microhistory of an infection. The current version of my work was adapted for online publication, with visual elements of composition.
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.
Metamorphosis: Strategies of Convivial Survival
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Marina Grzinic, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The last decade has witnessed a metamorphosis in terms of the co-development of a new definition and practice of conviviality as a positive, affirmative act of doing in the form of change. However, the pandemic in the form of social distancing, contagion and isolation presents a new obstacle to conviviality.
The aim of our work is to explore and develop artistic practices that have the potential to intervene in these disrupting dynamics of conviviality. We start from the assumption that arts-based research can function as an affirmative metamorphic force to deepen and strengthen convivial practices. We will engage in a practice of living together through shared learning in the format of convivial working groups and workshops.
This exposition will present the artistic scientific research line that is connected to the FWF-PEEK Project “Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (AR679).
As part of our three-year research project, three Convivial Study Workshops will be organised in cooperation with our partner maiz – Autonomous Centre of and for Migrant Women in Linz; two will take place in Vienna (AT) and one in Linz (AT).
In the first year, we are planning the first workshop to explore the global narrative of the pandemic and the social order of distance, contagion and isolation. This condition has impacted numerous NGOs, artistic grassroot collectives and art students, migrant organizations and LGBT*QIA+ communities in the context of the anti-migration and anti-refugee regime in Austria.
In preparation for the actual workshop and in cooperation with the workshop participants we will create a Convivial Script — an exposition as a digitally produced performative story of learning and living, which will function as an archive of linguistic, visual, audio, textual interrogations/representations of obstacles to conviviality.
When gathering - and singing - is no longer safe
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Kristin Norderval, Linda H. Lien, Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The human voice is vital to the creation of rituals around important and existential life events: to celebrate, to mourn, to commemorate, to protest. Speeches, chants, singing, intoning, shouting are all used to mark these events. What happens when the voice itself is dangerous, instead of healing? How do we engage in ritual and vocal expression? This explores the actions and sounding strategies taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Oslo, spring 2020.
To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.open exposition comments (0)
What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.open exposition comments (0)
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.open exposition comments (0)