KOSMOSOMSOK 

…in your hands there’s an invitation. It’s the first part of a four-act plunge that leads you to a place called kosmosomsok. The invitation includes a few guidelines and questions that we hope you will follow and review according to your curiosity and interest. The invitation is the route, the course and directions of which you decide and through which the kosmosomsok begins to open. The invitation is personal…

KOSMOSOMSOK is a four-act in-/outdoor performative plunge into the Universe and its history. The age of the Universe, 13.8 billion years, is impossible to comprehend. Equally difficult is to understand what has happened during that time and how it has shaped humans. How can we as bodily beings experience being part of the Universe that has made us? What can we do to reach and embody its incredibly long periods of time or incomprehensible proportions? Will time be experienced only by transforming it into a place or movement, and locating yourself in them?

Premiere outdoor version: 5 September 2021 at Ehkä-tuotanto, Kutomo, Turku
Premiere indoor version: 7 April 2022 at Pengerkatu 7— Työhuone, Helsinki
The project was presented in the Performance Philosophy conference at Uniarts Helsinki in 2022

Working group: Simo Kellokumpu, Tuukka Perhoniemi, Thomas Westphal
Narrator in the audio: Outi Condit
Production: Ehkä production, Simo Kellokumpu, Tuukka Perhoniemi and Thomas Westphal
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre, Niilo Helander Foundation
Language: Finnish
Photos: Vincent Roumagnac
Thank you: Jenni Savander, Riku Perhoniemi, Kai Alhanen, Kenneth Siren, Vincent Roumagnac

KOSMOSOMSOK is a participatory walking piece and installation that aims to bring space closer to the participant through an audio track, which includes a few simple tasks, and through sculptures created in dialogue with visual artist Thomas Westphal. The background material for the sculptures came from our discussions about blending high-tech devices with fossils, and imagining future-oriented, recognizable techno-fossils, objects whose purpose is unclear or ambiguous. You can see the sculptural objects in the images here.

The project developed through various phases, starting from the participatory walking piece in an open non-urban environment and ending up as an installation. During the project I also had an ongoing dialogue with space philosopher Tuukka Perhoniemi, with whom the walking piece was realized (see the dialogue under the images). The walking piece had four scenes and the first one was the audio-part, in which the participants were given the MP3 players and instructions to start together. The audio is below, translated from Finnish. In the work it is read by actor Outi Condit in a calm pace and voice, giving participants time to ponder the questions and move around. Altogether the audio is 31 minutes, 20 seconds long. The piece continued with a brief performative part in which people could choose one of the sculptural objects and follow the next scene: a performative act by me and Perhoniemi. The piece ended with an experiment together to walk slowly toward the future backwards, holding the sculpture in the hands. In the installation version, the viewer was invited to listen to the audio and choose one object meanwhile listening the audio in a studio setting.

AUDIO TRANSCRIBED

KOSMOSOMSOK ACT 1: THE BIG BANG AND THE FOLLOWING 9 BILLION YEARS

You do not exist. The universe does not exist. Not even time exists. This cannot be happening. There is no way to explain where these sounds come from or what they are.

You do not exist. The universe does not exist. Not even time exists. This cannot be happening. There is no way to explain where these sounds come from or what they are.

You do not exist. The universe does not exist. Not even time exists. This cannot be happening. There is no way to explain where these sounds come from or what they are.

Are you ready? Everything is about to begin. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
A blink. The universe is born.
Singularity. Elementary particles form.
And now atoms and photons move in a transparent, expanding universe. 

SINGULARITY

What is the singularity haunting the beginning of time? Everything originates from it; matter, time, and space, but in itself, it is still nothing. A singularity is difficult to understand and imagine. It might evoke the idea of a point, but it is not a point. It does not necessarily mean a spatial or non-spatial point that begins to grow as space expands. A singularity may already be infinitely vast and infinitely dense.

What does the expansion of infinity mean? Perhaps the expansion of infinite density means dilution? What about the expansion of infinite space? As matter begins to take shape, the whole becomes easier to comprehend.
Singularity is a mystery yet to be solved.

Bring your attention on a blink. Try blinking at different durations.
Take a few steps in some direction. Refocus on the blink.
Now add a small simultaneous finger movement to the blink.
How short can you make a blink?
How small a finger movement?

Look at the ground within a few meters radius and check that there are no pits or large rocks, or other possible obstacles. Then close your eyes and take a few calm steps in some direction.
When you’ve taken a few steps, open your eyes. First look at your toes. Then slowly raise your gaze toward the horizon, far away. How far can you see?
The universe is expanding, and you are now free to move in any direction. 

STARS AND TIME

The universe now consists of atoms, and the first stars formed from them already exist. The elements present include hydrogen and helium. There is empty space between the stars, which is expanding. However, the expansion slows down slightly over time.

What does time mean in a universe made of matter and motion?
Is it cyclical, as stars orbit each other under the pull of gravity? 
Does it have a direction toward the future, even if the future does not yet exist?
Is a return to the past possible once the stars die out?

Stars produce heat. In their cores, atoms fuse. This change is one-directional. Thus, time could be thought of as having a heat-determined direction. Atoms can also help quantify it — measuring units and intervals.

How might a conscious being living in a later era perceive this elapsed time as experience?
As a felt duration?

Now find yourself a quiet place or space.
The universe is constantly expanding.
You can move further from others, but maintain visual contact with at least two other people in this group. You now have a moment to move to a place of your choice.

There are already hundreds of billions of stars, beginning to form galaxies.
Where are you now?

The expansion of the universe continues to slow. At the very beginning, it surged and expanded faster than light. Since then, it has expanded more moderately, slower than light.

Look up at the sky. I will now ask you a series of questions:
Does the center of the sky look the same as its edges?
Where is the center of the sky in your field of view?
Where are its edges?
Does anything change when you move your gaze from the center to the edges?
Do you see anything moving?
Forming?
Disintegrating?
How quickly does your gaze find the Sun?
Let your gaze return from the sky to your immediate surroundings and its shapes.
What kind of outlines does this place create?

LIGHT

Time is entwined with space. This becomes apparent when observing the speed of light.
Let’s explore this a bit further.

Look as far as you can and find a visible object. How far away is it?
You are seeing it in the past because the light reflected or emitted from it traveled for many nanoseconds before forming an image in your eyes or, if you glanced at the Sun, the light traveled for over eight minutes.

Likewise, the stars behind the blue sky and clouds are in the past. Some a few years, others hundreds or thousands. The Andromeda galaxy is two million years in the past. More distant galaxies lie billions of years away. The oldest observable radiation takes us to the very beginning of the universe.
So here we stand, and before us unfolds the entire history of the universe.

Next, try to find a target where you can notice the difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light.
This target is probably far away — hundreds of meters — and it produces sound. Singular or continuous. On the ground or in the air. If you don’t find a suitable target, can you recall an experience of such a situation, right here where you are?

The target could be an airplane flying high in the sky, ten kilometers up. You see the plane and hear it. But the sound doesn’t seem to come from where the plane actually is. The sound is delayed.
Light rays from the plane reach your eyes faster than a blink, but the sound lags nearly three hundred times slower. In such spatial observation, time plays a role. The observation ‘lasts’ and, in doing so, creates a sense of reality.

ORBIT

Our planet Earth orbits the Sun once per year. Earth’s speed through space exceeds one hundred thousand kilometers per hour. It moves through space a hundred times faster than sound through air.

Earth also spins on its axis once per day, with surface speed exceeding one thousand kilometers per hour, depending on the location.
The Milky Way also rotates around its center, carrying the Sun along.
Together, these orbital motions form your path within the Milky Way.
Many different orbits happen simultaneously. Quite complex.

Let’s start with one orbit: Earth’s rotation on its axis. Can you perceive this rotation? How would you walk that path?

How about Earth’s orbit around the Sun? How might you sensitize yourself to that motion? Try walking it next.

Then try walking the orbital path suggested by the Milky Way’s movement.

Can you still walk straight after these experiments?

Good. Don’t worry if your head is spinning.

Now gently return your attention to your surroundings.

The universe continues to expand. You are free to move however and wherever you wish. Still, keep visual contact with at least two members of the group.

What kind of kosmosomsok has revealed itself so far?

Now I will ask you a few time-related questions to reflect on at your own pace, beside time, within time, or in some other time:
Look for things in your environment that are younger and older than you.
How do they form this exact place you are in now?
What different kinds of time do you observe in your surroundings?
Is the time of the things you perceive the same as your time?
What does it mean to exist at the same time?
And is there time without motion? Does time arise from movement?
Or do time and motion simply share something?

Time will now pass before you hear my voice again. But before I fall silent, I’ll leave you with one final thought: How does being near things older or younger than yourself affect your experience? 

I’ll return to you after some time… passing, passing, passed….

Hello again, here we are.

The universe is already so vast and galaxies so far apart that the dark energy present everywhere overcomes gravity and begins accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Around the same time, a star condenses from a great cloud of gas in space — just as has happened hundreds of billions of times before. A planetary system begins to form around the star, with both smaller rocky planets and larger gas giants.

Where are you now, here?

Now, focus on the participants within your field of vision.
Pick two of them. You may now begin to slowly walk around the two people you chose. I suggest directing your circling so that you eventually return to the place where you received this audio invitation. We will all gradually gather back at the place we started together.

Pay attention to your orbit. Are the two people you chose circling others? Are you all circling something together?

When you arrive at the place we started from, the first act is over.
You may arrive at your own pace — there’s no rush.
Once you’re there and ready, you can take your headphones off.
That’s how we know we’re ready to continue together.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure to journey with you.

SPACETALKS

SPACE TALKS is a dialogue between choreographer-researcher Simo Kellokumpu and philosopher Tuukka Perhoniemi. The dialogue considers what kind of starting points astronomy opens for both the artist and the philosopher. The motivation for the discussion is to address the conditions of life, being human, and making art in the light of contemporary astronomical knowledge. The goal of both makers is to find new perspectives on the human experience of the Universe. The dialogue was part of the KOSMOSOMSOK project. 

Simo: To start with, I think we could open from where this dialogue began. In 2015–16, I made a work titled Seasons as Choreographers: Where Over the World is Astronaut Scott Kelly?, which was part of my doctoral artistic research project in the Performing Arts Research Centre in the Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts Helsinki. To put it briefly, this project took me to explore movements in which my body already is part of and which challenge my immediate perception. These include for example the rotation of the planet Earth around its own axis or its orbit around the Sun. Since then, I have actually worked with that kind of movement-realm, which escapes mastery and which cannot be perceived right away. Space, space culture, and astronomy arrived in my work through this process. This artistic research continues currently in my postdoctoral project ‘xeno/exo/astro-choreoreadings’, which I’m conducting as a visiting researcher in the Performing Arts Research Centre. How have you arrived in these fields?

Tuukka: When I was studying philosophy at the university, I also participated in all sorts of lectures that I thought were interesting. So, I did the first two courses on astronomy too and that took me to Ursa, Astronomical Association. So, after that, besides the philosophical research, I worked in astronomical education and tried to make the difficult cosmic scales somehow understandable. When you contacted me and proposed co-operation, I immediately saw an opportunity to widen my pedagogically-oriented ways of thinking about the cosmos.

Simo: When participating in your course in the Ursa Astronomical association, my motive was similar: to find a dialogue partner to nourish the multiple perspectives in the artistic processes. When it comes to my artworks, parallel with working with movements that challenge the immediate perception, the other significant practical point has been working with the notions of ‘place’ and ‘space’. I have worked with these multi-meaning concepts for a long time, for example through a very open questions such as: ‘How do I take place if everything moves?’ or ‘How does a chosen cultural context operate as a choreographic apparatus?’ The questions have made me ponder eventually how movement, place, space, and time are related and how they form a motional or kinetic sphere in which my body takes place as part of it. This starting point is in dialogue simultaneously with the practice that creates place and space also to the level of a ‘piece’ in terms of how an artwork creates its own place, space, and context. In the ongoing project the notions of space and place are amplified to outer space and I’m sketching works which materialize what kind of materiality and corporeality form in these imaginary dimensions, and how the artistic notion of site-specificity is rescaled beyond its historical Earth-centered settings.

Tuukka: These spatial loci are familiar themes in philosophy and although connected to astronomical space–time continuum and structure they lead into questions with strong theoretical connections (where are we in the universe, in which ways our location and movement is always relative, what is our place in the universe?) that tend to be far away from the bodily experience and the level of experience in general. That is why working with these themes as bodily questions brings such concreteness to it that you won’t get by reading cosmology. ‘How am I situated in the universe?’ is a question that needs to be sliced into parts: What is my location on planet Earth? What kind of impact does this fact have on me? What does it mean that the planetary evolution of the Earth has molded me as a bodily being and my experiences on the surroundings? Is it possible for me to experience the constant changes of the universe?

Simo: One of the most meaningful shifts in this process has been the transformation of my understanding of movement. I used to work with that kind of conception of movement in which movement is understood as material that a choreographer can master and control. Nowadays I understand movement as a phenomenon, which escapes human control, so the shift has caused significant changes in my embodied and choreographic practice.

Tuukka: Could you, Simo, describe a bit more what do you mean by this shift? Maybe with examples? If you are thinking about movement as a self-guiding phenomenon that you cannot manipulate — or don’t want to — as much as you would if you thought of it as some kind of material, how does this affect your choreographies? Concentrating on subtle changes? A wider appreciation of context?

Simo: I think it is about coupling into the movement another mode and orientation rather than a mastering one, and taking place somewhere else than in the center (of the stage for example). One example is the work titled Seasons as Choreographers: Where Over the World is Astronaut Scott Kelly? (2015-16), which I mentioned above, where during one year I walked repeatedly around one route and worked with a macromovement that causes the seasons, namely the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. In parallel to this daily practice, I followed the Twitter account of the NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who was on a one-year mission in the International Space Station during that time (https://x.com/stationcdrkelly). While rotating around the Earth, Kelly collected and shared tweets; so, I decided to assemble tweets from the walks as a remote dialogue with his tweets. The tweets were one attempt to find vocabulary for the corporeal dimension of the practice, which started to develop from the walking-practice. The other example could be one of my latest works, Oumuamua_Gravity Escape (2021), in which I work with the imaginary movements of the eponymous interstellar body. In this process, I followed the news about this first observed interstellar object in the Solar System, Oumuamua, and I collected visual data, which was circulating in these articles. Based on this I realized the piece together with my colleague Vincent Roumagnac. The installation invites the viewer into the red floored and dark room to spend time with a ten-minute video and a hand-made, lava-like board, which has a similar form to the depictions of Oumuamua that I found in the scientific articles. It is kind of an interstellar surfboard, which might, as a miniature scale model, and with a sense of humor and theatricality, resemble Oumuamua.

My artistic work is also based on considering the context and contextualization, and how an artistic material then settles into somewhere. In this process, movements that form a particular place entangle with the movements produced by the process of corporeal place-taking. A good example of the questions of movement and place-taking is, I think, our recent collaboration on the performative and participatory audio-walk kosmosomsok, which invites the participants to experience ‘The Universe in Four Acts’. The acts consist of a twenty-five-minute audio-walk guided by actor Outi Condit’s voice; an introduction to the planetary formations through observing mini-sculptures produced for the project by visual artist Thomas Westphal; a brief lecture about the history of life on Earth; and a short opening towards the futures, through a guided embodied experiment.

Tuukka: Exactly. kosmosomsok is exciting because it has time in its center but its time is experienced as movements. And this is a good way to think about the performance as a whole. It is an attempt to transform the temporal evolution of the universe into a bodily experience. Of course, 13.8 billion years is an impossible number of years, but it is possible to experience the different temporal ratios included in its evolution: The first stars are born some seconds after the Big Bang, and for the Solar System one has to wait for twenty minutes. You can experience time as waiting but also as a movement — and both are bodily states of some sort. This way we can think of both Aristotle’s notion of time as movement or change (kinesis) and Bergson’s idea of duration (durée) as the nature of time.  

From both perspectives, you can try to manipulate the time/movement, but the task is much more subtle than creating something which in my mind is choreography in a traditional meaning. The feeling of duration can be created with different expectations or delusions (for example that something will last ‘very long’ is over ‘very quickly’). Funny how time really hasn’t got its own vocabulary despite all the talk about it. It is often thought of as spatial or material terms such as ‘long’ or ‘short’. Maybe this has something to do with time as a movement?

Simo: That’s a good question! kosmosomsok is indeed from my perspective a continuation of my one-year walk and pas-de-deux with an astronaut orbiting in space, which I mentioned earlier. Even if kosmosomsok can be set anyplace, it’s been important to work outdoors in order to have a chance to observe the sky or, for example, how far one can direct the gaze. The experience of the distances and movements are approached with simple perceptual exercises and tasks, in which place-taking is entangled with the simultaneously multidirectional and multitemporal worlds. In kosmosomsok we have also dealt with the challenge of linearity from the understanding that we are not inviting the audience into walking a timeline there, right? Could you clarify how movement and time can be thought of from that perspective in kosmosomsok?

Tuukka: Almost always, the age of the universe is demonstrated with a timeline which is either a straight line or a cone in which the time goes from left to right. The Big Bang is on the left and the present is on the right. I’ve done many of this kind of timelines ranging from 1.4 meters to 1.4 kilometers. They are very useful in representing time ratios, such as for how long had the universe existed before our Sun was formed, or how long it took for the one-cell lifeforms on Earth to turn into multicellular organisms. The hundreds of millions or even billions of years are impossible to comprehend as numbers but turning them into a line helps. Timelines are also an easy way to show the chronological order of things. Ultimately, we still have to face the question: Is time in itself linear?

Linear time means it has only one direction and that it does not have an end. Whether these features are applicable to time is a difficult question. The alternative or counterpart of linear time is the cyclic view of time in which the cycles always come back to the beginning and start new cycles. However, these are not the most interesting points of view when regarding the nature of time in kosmosomsok. The interesting questions concern the experience of time. Regardless of the linear/cyclic aspects of time, the timeline (and time cycles) transforms time into space (into a line or a circle). As such it is uniform. In contrast, our experiences of time tell us that sometimes it goes faster and in other times it feels longer. Also, for one person a moment can be longer than for another person. (Also, according to the theory of relativity time is a more subtle aspect of reality, not just a line.)

In kosmosomsok the whole chronological development of the universe is not transformed into a spatial form but into temporal experiences of multiple participants. The sequences are there and hopefully the participants experience the durations of the different parts of the story (oops, another big word to analyze…) in more or less the same way. With all this we are already quite deeply in the profound questions: What is time actually? How can it be represented in different ways? What is the relationship between temporal durations and ‘time as it actually is,’ and its representations?

Simo: Yes, as far as I understand, the history of human time has been thought to begin from following the movements of the Sun and Moon in the sky, which helped to mark the distances passed or traveled. Understood like this, moving from point a to b becomes kind of an act in which one takes place in the relationality of simultaneous multiple motional elements. Whether it then produces a linear experience is maybe a different question of orientation, perception, and focus. 

Tuukka: Luckily, we don’t have to solve these questions in a theoretical sense but we can deal with them by constructing a loose choreography for the participants, one that leaves space for everyone’s own experiences. The choreography includes ways we have thought of to steer the temporal experiences of the participants in ways that they would get a sense of the durations and rhythms of the universe. I don’t want to say that they would ‘understand’ or ‘grasp’ the universe. I do think the participants have good possibilities to understand the universe better because of kosmosomsok, but that is not our aim, it is not the goal of kosmosomsok, and it is not a criterion by which to examine the whole thing. Instead, I think kosmosomsok is an attempt to experience the temporal ratios of the universe and challenge the participants to think about the different times and durations around us. And because they are bodily actors in kosmosomsok, they will experience those as their own movements and as movements of others. This is what I think is happening in kosmosomsok.

Simo: That’s true. It’s interesting what you say about making loose choreography. I think primarily we have tried to find ways to couple into the movement worlds that escape human mastery. This in fact has made me think about how the term ‘choreography’ offers etymological or practical means enough to reach those registers of movements that I am interested in to work with. In my work movement, time, and space operate on the same ontological level, which means that movement is not something that goes through space and time, but all these three are constituting each other. With this kind of understanding about the coupling into the movement, I developed in my doctoral artistic research project the term: ‘choreoreading’, which describes my artistic practice. To put it shortly, it is about working with the movements that escape immediate perception with the body-organism, which is constantly reacting to its kinetic conditions. We have also discussed the Western philosophy of movement and I have got to know, for example, philosopher Thomas Nail’s thinking (2018a). He aims to shift movement into the core of philosophy and open its history from that perspective. As a choreographer this kind of perspective affects my place- and context-responsive work in a way in which places, spaces, and contexts are dynamic motional entities. For example; if I was working in a theatre, a black box would be constituted by various motional agents, and my work as a choreographer is currently based on working with such agents in order to produce some sort of perceptual and experiential transformation to be available and open for the viewer. I usually work outdoors nowadays though and of course, the works can be displayed indoors as performance-installations, for example. My work with space and sci-fi has also brought exoplanetary materiality and temporality into the artistic processes. What do you think about this, how the place of a human has changed then from an exoplanetary perspective?

Tuukka: It might very well be that I’m using the word ‘choreography’ too lightly there. I wouldn’t say that we are trying to manipulate the movement, but I think we are giving careful thought stimulus. We cannot know their effects, but we have speculated and tested how they work. So, is it wrong to say that this is steering of a kind? When we propose the participants turn their attention to the sky or to find something of a different age from their environment, it guides them in a different way than if we would propose to them, say, to make a somersault or grab some sand in their hand. The exoplanetary perspective is a very interesting theme because I believe it has really started to unfold in the past twenty-five years and for me it’s easier to think that the implications of the whole perspective will take shape during this century. So it might be that it is too early to really say a lot about it. Still some things seem clear enough. For example, today we know that there are extremely different planet systems in the Milky Way and they don’t resemble our own solar system in any way. Astronomers have perceived systems that no one was even able to imagine before. Also, the systems are in different stages in their development which leads us to the following thought while reflecting ourselves and our own planet and its system: We are like this and in this kind of place at the moment. It was different before and it will be different in the future. The Solar System will be different. Planet Earth will be different. Human being will be different. Basically, this just means thinking in terms of the theory of evolution. The idea is 150 years old but surprisingly we haven’t been able or willing to see it everywhere. Practical Platonism is so much stronger way of seeing things and means that things are always essentially something and don’t change. So, we like to say that ‘the Solar System is like this’ and ‘the human being is like that’ when we should add in every description the words ‘at the moment’. So, it is also about time….

Simo: Exoplanetary is relevant also from the perspective of site-specific art and in my project, it raises a question what might exo-corporeality mean. Maybe kosmosomsok focuses more on the question of what ‘planetary’ could mean in terms of Earth and inhabiting it on a larger astronomical scale. What can be the corporeality of Earth? The speed, which is present at the moment… indeed…. Last question for now, what do you mean when you say that evolution’s meaning has not been thoroughly thought of when it comes to everything?

Tuukka: The idea of Darwin was that all the species evolve through natural selection because of the changing conditions in the surrounding environment. So, the changes in the environment are a key idea for evolution, in a way its foundation. The radical thing about Darwin was his argument that all the species evolve, also the human species. His contemporaries didn’t want to think about it. For them it was much more convenient to think of human species as something fixed, to think of humanity as something everlasting. Afterwards it seems obvious that the idea of evolution applies to everything in the universe. Also, the planet systems are evolving systems and we can only perceive their current status. Earlier they were different and in the future they will be different. Despite all this it is not until the twenty-first century that we are thinking this way in the context of the Solar System and the planets in general. And this I think is part of the exoplanetary perspective. Put it this way and it’s not so strange. Still we tend not think of our own being or our world this way in the evolution of billions of years, or to think of our environments in the radius of hundreds of millions of kilometers — even though all of the hydrogen atoms in our bodies are coming from the Big Bang and even though we feel the heat of the Sun on our skin and its source is 150 million kilometers away….

Simo: Yes, and in that feeling of the heat a bit more than eight minutes is materialized.