I took part in a course on Jacques Rancière’s thinking on art and politics, organized in collaboration between Aalto University, the University of Arts and the University of Helsinki, Department of Law. The course was composed of lectures on Rancière’s thinking by Janne Porttikivi, interventions done by other lecturers and group work done by the students. The meetings took place using the Microsoft Teams conference call environment. The course was an exceptional example of interdisciplinary pedagogics, due to the unconventional combination of contexts of law and art, invoked by Rancière’s work.
Together with spatial designer, DA Maiju Loukola I was responsible for one of the interventions, the one connected with the theme of art. Appropriating Rancière’s term distribution of the sensible, we prepared a practice in the form of an experiential performance trilogy, included in the genre of ready-made art and taking place in multiple locations at the same time. This piece was continuing my work in Draft 19, the course on performance during a pandemic. It was also inspired by a BA thesis of a colleague of mine, Anniina Väisänen. In her thesis, Väisänen carried out an experiment, in which she framed a 5 minute slot of her everyday as a performance for the duration of January 2013. There were altogether 31 performances, which would start when her alarm rang either at 12am or 8pm, depending on the day (Väisänen 2013, 5).
The participants were asked to set an alarm on their mobile phone at 5pm and 5.05pm on three consecutive days. The first alarm would start the performance, which would take place wherever the participant might be at that moment. Something would perform for them. The second alarm would end the performance. The instructions are available below as a slide show.
In addition and as a prologue to this performance stretching over three days, I presented a short monologue. Using the share screen function of the zoom video call software, I made my text visible to the participants while I was reading it aloud.
In the post-discussion Janne Porttikivi, one of the lecturers on the course and the Finnish translator of Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, had critical comments on what I had said. I made additions to the text based on his feedback.
P a r a p r a c t i t i o n e r s k n o w l e d g e
Janne Porttikivi’s critique raised a further question in my mind. I thought that the practice-based knowledge produced and acquired through artistic research extended and expanded that of other disciplines. I also thought that artistic research questioned some of the basic tools and structures of academia, possibly of philosophy as well.
But even more interesting was this: if there is practitioner’s knowledge, is there also parapractitioner’s knowledge and could that be somehow exposed?
G a t h e r i n g i n t i m e
The autotheatrical practice we offered was an experiment on a gathering in time but not in place, not even a virtual one. The participants of the course would attend the work three times, each time simultaneously, without using technology to contact each other. Wherever they were, they would stop what they were doing when the alarm rang and start to witness their surroundings as a performance. They had no possibility to sense each other’s presence, at least within the common understanding of how senses work. They could trust in the probability that most of the others were taking part at the same time, but it was not certain. The existence of an audience body was speculative, ambiguous, thin and/or fragmented. There was no means of resonance, available in the previous draft through the conference call software. One could say that a common sensorium of sorts was created, but its parts could most likely not directly contact each other and the amplification created by collective resonances was in effect imperceptible.
Scrolling
Being confined to domestic conditions and contacting others remotely resulted in a need to find creative solutions in those circumstances. The affordances of the hardware, the operating system, programs and Internet services started to affect my research methods more than before. One of the significant features was the way webpages and digital documents are typically structured so that horizontal width adjusts according to each device and is limited to the width of the screen. The vertical height is instead unlimited (unlike the printed page) and can be accessed by scrolling the view on the screen up and down. Scrolling refers to the material format of scrolls, meaning rolls of paper or similar material with writing on them. Scrolls predate the codex format in the history of writing and were used already millennia ago.
I would continue the format of scrolling a long digital file while reading it aloud in Drafts 26 and 27. Then I transposed the act of scrolling to physical rolls of paper in Drafts 28 and 29, as well as in Audience Body. Also most of this commentary utilizes the dramaturgy of scrolling.