Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation - Toward Non-Local Collaborative Art Practices by Søren Kjærgaard

'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability. The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres. On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure. These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.

Non-local Walks

Departing from the concept of non-locality we have been investigating how to establish new ways to entangle our practices and collaborate across urban spaces transnationally – to produce works together, at the same time, while not in the same place – reducing physical displacement.

'Non-local walks' is thus a collaborative method based on walking simultaneously in the different cities we inhabit by following a score composed by the group. For each (scored) experiment, we depart at the same moment and walk for an agreed amount of time, experimenting with different modes of moving, reading, listening, seeing, sensing, sounding and thinking through these urban spaces. While digitally mapping our routes and paces, we physically perform defined tasks in order to later assemble, analyse and experiment with our findings in further configurations. The performed tasks can include photographing, reading, writing, recording sounds, collecting objects, drawing shadows, etc.

Sharing here a line of performative 'Non-local walks' where the following series of transformations embark from the scores below (pdf), serving as protocols to perform actions from. As the scores often suggest, the post processing of the non-local walks are left open in order to experiment with further possible assembles, configurations and constellations of the work.

SOMETHING on

- the composition of the score: date, time, location, etc.

- the participants and arrangement.

- the categories of scores: collecting, listening, weaving, drawing, transposing, collective, walking a model, etc.