About this exposition
In the context of this course (speculative commentary) and in the context of my research (Networked Actor Theory, a title which was gifted to me by my friend, colleague and collaborator Vincent Roumagnac, playfully evoking Actor-Network Theory, thus drawing connections between my multiagential and technoentangled research and the material-semiotic toolkit developed by Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law among others; this gift itself serving as an example of how voices, agencies, matters, and turns twist together, in my research, maybe in everyone's research, but as an actor I'm particularly interested how one becomes with and through another, an other, machinic, fleshly, and/or precariously human) I have been thinking about writing.
What, how, where, when is writing in artistic research? How can I write?
In Figures of Touch (2018) Harri Laakso writes that the task of artistic research is to "keep grasping towards what cannot be grasped, to encounter the unknown as unknown, where the unknown will not be revealed, but indicated." My experience over the past four years has been trying to find ways to
frame
assemble
perform
provoke
something of the elusive experience of being, in the words of Lisa Blackman, "more than one, less than many",
inhabited and moulded by relations, matters, (secret) agents, machines and ghosts, yet still managing to find some space to wriggle.
As an artist researcher I feel I am inhabiting and inhabited by the middles of art and performance making, and epistemological practices, not as binary oppositions, but as fields of historically situated and contingent tensions. What is legible as writing is changing.
This mini-exposition consists of entangled writing experiments made through the Remote Control Human machine, developed in the context of my research as a speculative re-assemblage of elements, bodies and politics belonging to the dispositifs of theatre. Here I enquire how does this artistic (researcherly) arrangement produce writing, how can the artistic strategy both write and be considered as writing, and how does the entanglement of voices, agencies and identities that I associate with the works made through Remote Control Human translate into multimedial, expositional writing.
The writing experiments were arranged in the following way: I asked artist researchers who are either already entangled with my research or whose interests or approaches somehow intersect with mine to collaborate. For each I wrote a "script" or a "seed", maximum one page long, attempting to write towards them, placing myself in the intersection of my approach and theirs, but also projecting towards the future, imagining myself in the apparatus with them. I sent the scripts about a day before each session, and invited them to edit and rewrite freely, as they liked. Then I asked them to perform their version of the script in front of the camera, through the Remote Control Human machine, with myself as their remote control avatar. I also asked them to decide on the location and frame the image, in effect, to split their artistry into two: to both inhabit and perform through my body, and to control what the camera sees as well.
In practice the arrangement was realised through a telephone connection in between the "driver" and the "avatar", in this case myself, and simple game mechanic consisting of signals via a dog clicker: one click for speech and two for action. In addition the "driver" could see through two screened streams from two action cameras, one on the body of the "avatar" (P.O.V.-cam), and another behind the filming camera, so that the "driver" could see both the frame of the camera and the "avatar" behind it (panopti-cam).
Remote Control Human plays with questions of agency and mediation; human and technological agencies and processes of human and technological translations glitch, gap, and collide in the assemblage. The voice is displaced and the actorly body becomes a stage, not an empty stage, although sometimes, momentarily, void of meaning, presence, and sense.
If its possible to consider that this apparatus produces writing, where and when is the writing and who is writing? Is this collaborative writing, machinic writing, even kin to automatic writing?
For this exposition I collaborated with Vincent Roumagnac (Uniarts Helsinki), Simo Kellokumpu (Uniarts Helsinki), Mika Elo (Uniarts Helsinki and Stacey Sacks (Uniarts Stockholm). The exposition is in progress.
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