Passion rules the arrow that flies: Investigating fleeting performance experiences
If passion & joy are our core drivers for musical performance, then how do we investigate their lived experience? How can we begin to unfold the infinitely dense network and interwoven planes of desires, drives, intentions, impulses, ideas and actions? How can we identify in-depth and in-the-moment states that constitute experience and what are the dimensions that we can touch upon and articulate?
I will structure this presentation in three parts: a short lecture-performance, followed by a one-hour method workshop involving all participants, and a shared reflection in closing.
The lecture and workshop will touch upon topics such as: Experience research through artistic practice; the balance between experiential and discursive dimensions; the implicit, ineffable domains of performing and their epistemic potential as virtual knowledges to be actualised; dealing with blind-spots and the self-observation problem; large-scale artistic research processes and their archive(s); operating with data–model–simulation frameworks and their analysis and interpretation.
I intend to convey some elements from my own hybrid artistic research processes developed to investigate experience structures of performing. These methods are geared toward uncovering core aspects and moments of experience during ‘play’ that most often remain hidden and difficult to access, even using technically mediated methods and approaches borrowed from the social sciences, such as Grounded Theory coding or various types of Autoethnographies.
Participants will be asked to bring note taking materials, recording devices they are used to, and optionally prepare a short, three-minute performance of their practice, some of which we will explore as exemplars of method development.
Jan Schacher
Jan Schacher is an artist-researcher and educator performing on stage and other environments, working with and through sound, body, and presence. Trained as instrumentalist, composer, and digital artists, his practice has shifted from using sounds to be organised as music to seeing the body as the central site of action, perception, and culture, as the focal point in sounding performances. In his practice, he investigates how the musician's body establishes and grounds the intertwined relationship between perception, musical actions, and the intangible presence of sound. With a focus on the relationship to the Other(s) in artistic and social contexts he looks at the different agencies present when performing the world through sound. Jan Schacher’s artistic works have been situated in such diverse contexts as media festivals, improv music gigs, intercultural social projects, and sound art investigations in urban spaces and places. In parallel to his practice as an artist, from 2003 onwards, Jan Schacher was an Associate Researcher at the at the Zurich University of the Arts, where he led research projects on musical gesture, immersive media and sound, interaction and its perception from a position of both artistic and systematic research. Since 2021, he has been Professor of Music and Technology at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland.