The first Epistolary Research Network Conference was organized remotely on the 2nd of October 2021. The conference was open to different disciplines and I had been informed about it by Elina Saloranta, with whom I collaborated on Draft 18. Together with Elina we were the only artistic researchers that presented in the conference.
I constructed my presentation based on the formula I had used in the previous draft: a pdf-file, which I would scroll on the shared screen of my computer and simultaneously recite the body of text contained in the file, while leaving the included stage instructions unpronounced.
I did my best to find a soft spot between my own practice and the conference environment, and to reach across the digital network to touch the audience. The presentation was both an experiment in the series of my experiments and a presentation of my work, of which I used Draft 9 as an example.
I framed the presentation appropriately as a letter to the attendees and both started and ended it with references to other speakers I had listened to during the conference so far. This was a disclosure of their complicity and to enhance the singularity of the event. Faithful to my interests, I also addressed the gaps of time and place that were present in the format.
I n t e r e s t a s a r e a s o n f o r e n t e r i n g t h e l i m i n o i d
To enter a liminal or a liminoid state, the one entering needs to have a reason. When talking about transitional rituals and the liminal, the reason is often linked to the attendees own social status or spiritual ambitions. Sometimes they might also be forced to attend to avoid being subjected to violence; Schechner even defines liminality as compulsory in contrast to voluntary liminoidity (Schechner 2016, 120). In the context of art, the liminoid is governed by a subordination to a performance. In this case, the performance would in many accounts be the factor that has to awaken and hold the interest of its audience. Audiences want to be touched and moved by performances.
This became more and more important to me as my research progressed. I wanted to touch and move and craft my works accordingly. I included fewer academic references and more personal and intimate stories. I built dramatic effects into my texts, like the above insertion of a shadow over joy, an anticipation of a possible release in the future: “I do rejoice, sincerely, but there is also a tension, a charge created by the distance between the act of writing and the event of reading, and those involved”.
The letter was an appropriate tool for this intimate, poetic and possibly sentimental style. It was a site for close relations, for emotions, for daily observations, for confessions. So I told them stories of how I ended up in the field of artistic research, of how I lured my audience at Baltic Circle Festival with my Draft 9, even of how I fell in love or how my daughter plays next to me as I write.
This was not something that I had really considered during my research: why did audiences attend? Transformative experiences in the context of art did not only appear due to the mechanics of forming audience bodies, like my system claimed. They also needed something that would seduce audiences to attend and to stay. That had to do with the skill of the artist, I thought. So I directed my practice more towards beauty that has an arc that would absorb the audience into following it through.