Research Catalogue

the audience: drafts 1-x > is a series of experiments and expositions premiering in various venues and contexts > is more or less connected to the medium of performance and poses the audience as a question > considers the creation, or exposure, of a collectivity; a receptive, attentive many

Tuomas Laitinen is a doctoral candidate at Tutke, the Performing Arts Research Center of Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The subject of his doctoral research is the audience: what is the audience? Why is the audience? How to be an audience? In the Research Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019 Tuomas will engage in two projects: 1) creating a series of phenomenological etudes that focus on the phenomenon of audiencing. 2) observing the construction and opening of the Research Pavilion as a durational performance.

Through Phenomena Themselves Schedule

the second letter in the series of phenomenological etudes focuses on observing the explicit and implicit rules of our research environment.

What is an audience?

This is a workspace for the creation of some scores for the domestic space, in the context of a working group preparing a performance called "patch the sky with 5 colored stones".

Tästä löytyy väitöstutkimukseni lähdemateriaali: - esitykset, joihin olen osallistunut yleisön jäsenenä elokuusta 2017 lähtien sekä - kirjallisuus Here are the sources of my doctoral research: - performances, which I have attended as an audience member since August 2017 - literature

This exposition contains the textual materials of Audience Body, an artistic research performance that takes place at the Zodiak Stage, Cable Factory, Helsinki on the 10th, 12th and 13th of November 2022. The performance is part of the programs of Reality Research Center and Moving in November festival.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

This is an apparatus designed to address the issue of a shared place in these times of distance and displacement. It aims to take sensible slices of multiple places and compose them into a site somewhere else.