metamusic
(2020)
author(s): alien productions, Martin Breindl, Andrea Sodomka
published in: Research Catalogue
metamusic aims to develop interactive sound installations and electronic instruments for animals held in captivity. The project's target is to improve the animals’ quality of life, by designing an interactive musical environment that takes the specific needs and skills of the animals into consideration. metamusic, developed by the artists' group alien productions in collaboration with the zoologists and animal keepers of the ARGE Papageienschutz, centers its attention on grey parrots.
1 Day Artwork
(2020)
author(s): Betty Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Net art for unrealized site-specific performing arts installation, 2020
The exposition shows fragments of work prepared for an unrealized interactive site-specific public installation at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, South London. The installation would include dance performance, video/photography and structures with objects.
The work was produced at different times between the winter and summer of 2011. The installation was to be a collaboration with dance artist Susanna Recchia and photographer Rachel Cherry. Audiences would traverse or remain on site as long as they wished.
The Critical Pathways workshop by choreographer and artist Rosemary Butcher served as the starting point. Walking journeys allowed for emerging themes, such as pilgrimage, walking-the-lifeline and potentiality. The concepts of the moving body and the plane tree, a variety imported into the city, became intertwined. The performers would enact processes related to journeying and nomadism. The installation would create a virtual landscape of remoteness: a place for reflection.
Revisiting these works, I draw from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming animal to suggest that we rethink the notion of animal via the concept of the plan(e)/plateau. Deleuze and Guattari's advancement of the notion of the plan(e), from a metaphoric articulation of processes of translation into a conceptual apparatus of intersection across forms, enables the co-existence of multi-dimensional multiplicities against their reduction to two dimensions. The plane is one of consistency that is sustained across multiplicities. If it is the plane of Nature in the Deleuzian sense of natural history, it allows for the infinite multiplicity of individuals. Entering the plan(e)/plateau, one becomes part of an individuated assemblage depending on their relations of movement.
In memory of Rosemary.
Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts
(2020)
author(s): Betty Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Play in the format of the philosophical dialogue, 2019
Drama is pretense. But, unlike fiction, a theatrical play is not a pretended representation of a state of affairs; rather it is the pretended state itself, in which the actors pretend to be the characters doing the pretending in the actual performance of the theatrical play. The actor is in this way irrealised in the character. Aside from writing the play, which consists largely in pseudo assertions, the playwright gives the actors directions on how to pretend to make assertions and to perform actions. Therefore, the playwright is writing a recipe for pretense. Instead of pretending to write assertions, the playwright gives directions to the actors on how to enact a pretense.
The philosophical dialogue has been an established, although uncommon, method of philosophical writing, which usually deploys fictional characters to present a discussion between several divergent viewpoints on a topic of ordinary or philosophical interest. The juxtaposition and debating of opinions in ordinary uses of language, without prioritizing any opinion, endows the dialogue with open-endedness instead of conclusiveness. As McKeon (in Prince, 1996: 3) argues:
"Dialogue is statement and counterstatement, based on ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through opinions about reality. Truth is perceived in perspective, and perspectives can be compared, but there is no overarching inclusive perspective."
In this exposition, I exploit the dialogic format to expose the views of Jean-Paul Sartre, a well known philosopher and father of the existentialist philosophical and literary movement, and Maurice Blanchot, a rather obscure philosopher of literature and literary critic. Notably, both Sartre and Blanchot were active in the post second world war period, which significantly shaped their philosophical insights; specifically on modes of writing, including fictional prose, about a variety of topics, from politics, to ethics and aesthetics. Because referencing is rarely used in philosophical dialogues, here I employ full bibliographical referencing in the end. The dialogue presents an advantage for reaching a wider readership, beyond the confines of those with strictly philosophical and academic interests.
Prince, Michael, "Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2020)
author(s): Betty Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel video, 3’, 2008
The probe for the work was the philosophical question what it is to exist in the world: in environments, with others, people, objects, surfaces; and whether the answer can be intuited.
The work evokes the temporality of such experiences, which is contingent upon the ever-changing nature of things. Objects have often had multiple owners, and so they carry traces of previous worlds. When encountering objects new to us, we may find ourselves appropriating them through affective attachment to assimilate them into our world. Inspired by the everyday lives of the house's occupants, the work is also about the affective bonds developed during and because of their temporary co-existence.
Experimentation with overlaying resonates with the artistic expression of overlapping materials, textures, spatial qualities, and reflected images. Photographs, film footage and sounds were recorded in an improvised way over a one year period in an old house in Walthamstow, East London. The artistic treatment of the subject matter as a time-based media assemblage, which exploits the home style video format, critiques popular staged presentations of everyday life, while exploring the house as an evolving over time system.
The Walkies as Method:
(2020)
author(s): Darren O'Brien
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition sets the scene for my PhD thesis, in that it acts as a bridge between my experiments in Deep Canine Topography, (O’Brien, 2018) and my current research inquiry. Routed in the practice of walking art, and operating on the intersection between art, human geography and critical animal studies, this practice-based research is underpinned by concepts of the ‘animal turn’ in post-human, more than human, philosophy. It presents a number of short texts, which consider aspects of the human-canine co-authored walk, which will form a practice based methodology 'The Walkies as Method'. Accompanying this text is a number of short video and sound works, exploring the twists, turns and rhythms of the walkies, from the human-canine perspective.
4 / 4
(2020)
author(s): Eva Macali
published in: Research Catalogue
A collection of poems shortlisted at Italian national poetry prize Premio Elio Pagliarani in 2018 has been published in november 2019.
The collection includes texts from the writing experiments I had been doing between 2015 and 2018.
