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.
SCHRITTWEISE engl. Version
(2023)
author(s): Katja Münker, Andrea Keiz
published in: Research Catalogue
WALKING-CHOREOGRAPHY KIT
You will find a collection of experiments, questions to the research and reactions of participants.
Feel free to use it as a playground.
Listening in/to Exile: Migration and Media Arts
(2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.
“Step by Step” Reading and Re-writing Urban Space Through the Footstep
(2018)
author(s): Elena Biserna
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores the materiality of sound by focusing on the interaction between the walker and urban space established by the most “basic” form of soundmaking on the move – the sound of our footsteps. It considers the presence of footprints and empreintes in the contemporary arts and surveys a series of projects by artists and composers – Peter Ablinger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, katrinem, Dennis Oppenheim, and Jessica Thompson – highlighting the interplay between body and site established through the footsteps. By drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on city walking and on sound studies, I consider the step as the fundamental bodily contact with the environment while walking as well as a sound signal that generates a sense of presence, activates the surroundings, and locates us in space. Therefore, I interpret the footstep as a primary auditory event, allowing us to “read and rewrite” (Augoyard 2007) urban soundscapes, to explore and perceive – but also to reshape and participate in – acoustic spaces, establishing a material, embodied, situated, and mutual relationship with our context.
Stop and go: nodes of transformation and transition
(2017)
author(s): Michael Zinganel, Michael Hieslmair
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Stop and Go is a research project investigating physical and social transformation at nodes and hubs of transnational mobility and migration alongside major pan-European road corridors in a geographic triangle between Vienna, Tallinn, and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. It draws on intensive embedded field trips with a mobile lab (a Ford Transit van) using (deep) mapping, workshops, installations, and exhibitions both on tour and in a stationary work space in a Vienna logistics hub (a former railway station). Intermediate and final results have been represented in diagrammatic drawings, maps, and (animated) graphic novels.
Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design
(2017)
author(s): Jordan Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.
The cultural politics of pervasive drama: aural narrative, digital media and re-compositions of urban space
(2015)
author(s): Eva Giraud
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article argues that pervasive drama has the capacity to illuminate the cultural politics of urban space, by highlighting microsociological power relations that shape everyday movement. It suggests that the medium does this in two ways: firstly, through its use of “pervasive sound narratives” that actively defamiliarize urban space and, secondly, through the auditory technologies that disseminate this narrative, which draw attention to everyday engagements with mobile media that are ordinarily beneath our notice. These arguments respond to Anderson’s call for further research into the “productive listening potentials” of aural narrative (Anderson 2012), by exploring specific ways that pervasive drama can foster more meaningful and politically-engaged experiences of place. Drawing on The Memory Dealer as a case-study, narrative extracts and focus group findings from the drama are used to illustrate pervasive drama’s specific, politicised “listening potentials”.
P.A.F (pavement.as.fails)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Maëlla Castiglione
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.
Deer, Tigers, Perec and The Everyday - a choreographic approach
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): STELLA MASTOROSTERIOU
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
My research focuses on the interrelations between different types of spaces and the types of movement they encourage or impose. The research is inspired by the writings of writer Georges Perec and informed by concepts and methods from the fields of sociology, anthropology and architecture.
This portfolio supplements the written exegesis of my practice-led research process, which revolves around two interwoven strands / projects, and serves as an analysis of the artistic outcomes and as documentation of the artistic processes. The practice research has been constantly informed by theoretical concepts deriving from an extensive theoretical research, which will be selectively reported. Several smaller projects, experiments and workshop processes that I will briefly delineate in this paper, led into forming two more elaborate projects that I have been developing in the past year and will be more extensively reported in this paper.
The first strand has to do with working in the public space and aims to devise ways of thinking and creating in and for the public space. Under the title I DON’T SEE DEER, I work with observation and writing as a tool for studying everyday life and movement in the public space, in order to highlight existing aspects of the city and propose new site-specific situations. Both the research process and the artistic outcomes were located outside – in the urban space. The process and the outcomes of this part of the research have so far been translated into various forms: a video work, a live performance, a photographic series, a workshop, and most importantly the outline of a flexible way of working that I can bring into different places and groups.
In the second strand, I attempt to incorporate concepts, tools and findings from working in the public space into choreographic research and creation for the stage. While keeping observation of street life as one of my main tools, the practical research here was mainly studio-based. This strand led to the creation of the work WE ARE NOT TIGERS that I presented as my final project for the master.
The two strands did not follow any successive chronologic line. Instead they emerged and were developed concurrently, as autonomous processes that constantly affected and informed one the other, throughout the past year. In this paper though, I will mainly follow the chronological order of how my research path evolved, while linking the practice-led research to the theoretical research.