Program (quick overview)
10:00-10:45
On Interface: Questioning memory, matter and meaning through the haptic
Petrine Vinje
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Department of Art and Craft (3rd year presentation)
Moderator: Linda Lien
11:00-11:45
Surface Water, Public Spaces, and Speculative Monuments: Rituals and Communal Narratives
Robel Temesgen
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, The Academy of Fine Art (1st year presentation)
Moderator: Linda Lien
On Interface: Questioning memory, matter and meaning through the haptic (Petrine Vinje)
In the present, where the algorithms' matrices in the Internet of Things are with us in everything we do, we think in metaphysical terms, through non-conscious technology and data we connect to the inexplicable, imaginiative and immaterial in the Cloud. In pre-modern material text culture, we carved runic letters in metal plates, wooden sticks and bones, about gods, love and demonic forces. In these past times the transfer from an oral to a written culture was dependent on technology. This artistic research project aims to look at understanding man as an ‘animal metaphysicum’ interacting with materials and technology as means to engage with the unknown. The project investigates through the making of artworks, in the triangle between technology, material and the body.
The project readdresses the relationship between art, technology and the body and asks: How may the artworks suggest new environments to arise? The project attempts in many ways to understand the paradigm we are living in, unfolding the subject matter on a nonlinear timeline, as a method to look at materials, technology and environment of both past and current, as contact zones for phenomena, the unknown, and immanent material knowledge. The presentation will bring to the fore aspects from the projects methods and result, and point out the direction of the project in its final stage, where the concept of assemblage in art and cyber-materialist-feminist thinking is central.
Surface Water, Public Spaces, and Speculative Monuments: Rituals and Communal Narratives (Robel Temesgen)
Let me tell you about a story of a befriended Satan, a story I heard on my research trip in January 2022. Some time ago, an outsider went to a local community in Gojam where Abay, the Nile River flow by. The purpose of her trip was to capture an evil spirit in the river that has been troubling the community. Apparently, she managed to capture the Satan capsuled in the magnetic portal she brought with her. The community objected the act and took the matter to local court stating that this is their Satan, a Satan they have attuned their term of co-existence. They managed to win the case by arguing how it will cost them more to forge a new relationship with a new Satan, knowing that when the one captured leave, another one will inhabit the river.
With a focus on surface water and the spiritual within, my thesis project aims to look at connectivity and relatedness that leads to a language of coexistence and commoning. A deeper look into spirituality in form of rituals and stories that potentially become water agencies to protect itself from the community around it. Practicing Water; is an attempt to understand how water conjures another life to bridge the communication on habitation and co-existence.It is an investigation of rituals and communal narratives towards engagements of surface water as public space and speculated monument. The project examines the performativity of water within the physical and metaphysical that is imagined, claimed, inhabited, and lived.
Using materials and approaches from my first research trip to Gish-Abay, the source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, this presentation will examine accounts of reference, ethics, and a body of work towards actualization of the project. An elaboration on my departure point to develop a strategy on how to listen to water, and to understand the spiritual kinship like the befriended Satan.
Pending Xenophora (Marianna Bastashevski)
I am doing research that explores how emerging technologies of seeing, such as VR, could become spaces for field research set in speculative, alternative, or near future, worlds.
In particular, I am interested in the world of the soon to be extinct, yet formally unregistered, nameless gastropoda permeating the archive drawers of natural history museums across Europe. A world that passed us by.
Last year, I partnered with EPFL architecture faculty in Lausanne with the intention of designing a methodology which could serve as the basis to speculate a world into a model. An architectural framework for VR but also as an intellectual and methodological model for making art with animals. The constraints for said model was that it would be created not only for, but with other than human beings.
Together with a crew of architects we’ve devised a step by step methodology that could be transplanted or joined in other academic fields. The aim of this methodology is to explore what kinds of forms of knowledge production may constitute a post-anthropocentric subjectivity.
In this session I’d introduce you to results of this research, the process and the ensuring artwork in all components. At the end of the session we will try to see whether other artists can use these methodological approach to workshop their own ideas, eg use the proposed framework to built their own.
CANCELLED Hyperspace as a reflective tool: Strange Movements Through Spatial, Digital and Textbased Mediums (Sidsel Christensen)
This research project investigates how scientific/mathematical models of physical dimensions and their interrelationships, can be used as a generative tool in contemporary art. The exploration is situated within a cross disciplinary arena, that incorporates artistic strategies from New Media Art, Interactive installation and Performance Lectures, and merge them into an expanded whole, that I have chosen to call a “performative installation”. Throughout, I am engaging with digital, spatial, textual and performative practises, to investigate how interdimensional movement can work as reflective tool within these performative installations.
Currently, I am focusing on how the concept of Hyperspace be a conducive tool in this enquiry? How is it possible to apply textual speculation and digital interactivity, as a means to traverse the borderline between the material and the informational, and offer access to impossible movements and new folded perspectives, that aid our reflection on the relationship between mind and body, subject and surroundings.
For this 2nd Forum presentation, I will share the methodologies, reflections and ethical dilemmas that are in play while working with the project “The panel of Hypersubjects”. Here a group of participants explore how to enter the minds of bigger networks, through live action role play (LARP), as well as researching how this play can be set inside of responsive installations of sensors, programming and video projections – that then make up the body of these larger network minds.
While exploring this with the groups in the performative installations, I seem to be working towards articulating a form of expanded relationality and investigate how these hyperspatial modulations, can offer the performance-participants a way to experience shifts in their fundamental ontologies. In other words, if the work can offer alternative ways to relate, between humans and the more than human, including architecture, materialities and digital technologies.