Abstract
This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The artwork under study involves artistic practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal with the Canadian composer John Oliver, released in 2020. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam for an installation made by the author in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom (author et al 2016). In 2020, The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi which started out with a concert with John Oliver, and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice (Gorton and Östersjö 2019) is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction. The paper represents the final working phase of the Musical Transformations project, in which The Six Tones and the entire research team engaged in explorations of the potential of telematic performance to enhance intercultural experimentation with traditional music.
Isolation Journal:
remote interactions in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic
Stefan Östersjö (2003)
submitted to Contemporary Music Review.
