WORKSHOP I
“Doing space – sensing space”
Workshop-description (written by Lars Frers, Sociology of Space, Universitet i Sorost-Norge/Norway)
When we enter a space, we are enveloped by a host of sensual impressions. These impressions can lay thick and heavy on our senses, or they can be light and fleeting as a feather. They can be almost unnoticeable, like a tinnitus that has not yet crossed the threshold of really being there. They can be in-your-face, violent, and obtrusive. They can be uncomfortable and pleasant. And, what’s even more important, we also contribute to the same multitude of impressions – by listening, by moving around, by sitting still. We create sounds and other sensual impressions, and we change them, if we want to or not.
In these practices of listening and sensing, we thus perceive and create spaces. The interest lies of in the peripheries of the spaces that we cross and inhabit. How do we affect stuff, people, things that are marginal? How are we affected by what lies in the outskirts of our attention – do we attune to it; do we shy away or just plain ignore them? Should we do this differently?
In the workshop, we will employ different sensual registers to engage with the spaces sur- rounding us, and we will do so in different spaces. Most of the exercises will rely on your regular perception, but we will also try out ‘augmented’ sensing, especially listening. The exercises will be done in groups and alone.
- Walk around in urban spaces and in indoor spaces and try to find out who or what is sensually dominant (if anything) in that space. And what is there, but only barely so, on the periphery? And finally, what impact to you have – as a group?
- Repeat the same exercise in a series of different spaces/areas, now with everyone in the group taking turns and focusing on a particular sense (distribute senses in your group, there are a lot of different senses, choose which are interesting as a group, take care that everyone gets the chance to do augmented listening). Shift roles/senses a couple of times.
- Spread out alone. Take notes in two steps: 1. on the move, 2. being still. How does sens- ing space alone differ from doing so as a group?
- You will be interrupted in this individual exercise at one stage by a phone call. This will be to give and get feedback, but it will also be an opportunity to think about interrup- tions.
- Before meeting up with everyone again: To what degree were you just “sensing space” and to what degree were you “doing space”, i.e. creating space (maybe just for you, maybe for others, animate or inanimate as well). Take some notes or make a sketch, or record a voice or instrument or something similar to give an expression to what you experienced and thought.
WORKSHOP II
“No Conclusions: Multisensory Inquiry into Practice”
under the direction of Nina Sun Eidsheim, professor for musicology and vloice studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Workshop description (written by Nina Eidsheim, University of California Los Angeles)
Academia has colonized the senses. It has cut off the ear and put it in the music school; extracted the eyes for the art department, the legs for dance, and the tongue for the culinary arts and so on. Furthermore, a given field’s methodologies limits the imagination of the world, as for example, when listening methodologies teaches the ear to listen according to tempered tuning or discriminate between music and noise. Moreover, academia operates from an idealized sensory model that marks sensory divergent individuals.
None of the senses work in isolation. However, the available methodologies and vocabulary within a given discipline do not recognize this and, when applied, further segregates them.
This multisensory writing workshop seeks to both reveal the isolation of the sensorium within a given discipline as well as open up for new possibilities for researchers, whether from the humanities, social sciences, or the arts.
WORKSHOP III
"1. Walk&Talk as an opener for a class-room teaching situation"
Walk through the space. And lets try to fill the space equally.
How can you continue to build an even grid of bodies in space.
Focus on your body in motion, the sound it makes, on the little spaces between your cloth and your skin. The wind in there created by your steps. Your body hair how it brushes against your cloth. Like antennas….
Keep on going. Allow the things you see to sink in. Try to play with your focus, what is foreground, what is background.
You can also do that with the sounds ...
Lets keep on walking and whenever a thing, like an object or a sound, in the space draws your attention, point at it.
Lets keep on walking and let your attention travel. Start pointing at the things you see now with language. Call them in your head by their functional names, silently. Use the language that comes most natural to you.
Let’s voice these words. Put them in into the space as just more objects.
You can also whisper the names of the things you see or hear. Or shout them. Your can go into repetition mode until your attention is drawn elsewhere.
Keep on walking. Try to double check how you are in your body, the rhythm of your steps in relation to the other peoples steps. Are you faster? Do you feel the wind when another person passes. Can you smell that person? Try to zoom in acoustically on the sounds of the body most distant to you …
You point at the first thing without naming it. And the next thing that sinks into your attention, acoustically or in another way, you point at it and call it by the name of the thing before. Try to be in continuous movement …
Now you can give whatever name to whatever sensation or impression that registers … try to get away from only giving to the perceptions the names of the objects that cause them…
Integrate colors. Outlines. Textures. What are the words that come to you. You may also react to a word you hear. Its also an object in the space. Maybe they make you go into a particular gesture. Or sound … lets compose with this for a while … being in dialogue with the surrounding and the others ...
4. Documentation of the Low Latency Performances with the EAMT Tallinn and the mdw Wien
"Wie schnell ist schnell genug? Erfahrungen und Ergebnisse in der
digitalen, künstlerischen und technischen Arbeit mit LoLa und MVTP"
von Sebastian J. Spicker, Evelyn Buyken, Benjamin, Lars Schuster,
Jörg Mixtacki
Journal Article published on Researchgate.com