Research Catalogue

A new filigrane sound object (or series of objects) in the making, w.i.p.

The Body I Post examines how social media, algorithmic systems, and digital surveillance reshape contemporary understandings and performances of the body. Against the backdrop of theoretical frames leading from Foucault to N. Katherine Hayles, the project at hand scrutinizes the dynamics of shifting gazes, erosion of privacy, and the emergence of the posthuman subject. The work identifies the means by which identities are extracted, categorized, and refashioned through platform infrastructures and biased datasets, by investigating case studies such as Face to Facebook, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, and Trevor Paglen’s ImageNet Roulette. The research combines social experiments, visual references, and personal reflection to explore how bodies are curated for visibility, disciplined by metrics, and archived in ever-expanding digital memory systems. It questions the tension between material embodiment and its algorithmically mediated double and the ways in which humans have become simultaneously users, subjects, and raw data. The Body I Post is about what it means for us to exist as hybrids of flesh and code in an era where self-presentation has become continuous, performative, and inseparable from technological systems.

Excerpt from my forthcoming research project How to be a medium? including the script of How (not) to be a puppet and its first act as audio play.

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.

This research is grounded in the relation between listening and orientation through a kindred gesture: tending towards. Its object of inquiry is the dialogue between Paul Celan’s poems and Gisèle Lestrange-Celan’s etchings in the publication Atemkristall (Brunidor 1965, Vaduz). The choice of this pairing arises from the possibility of bringing together two elements: the breath and the ground. I follow the flux and exchange between breathing gestures and inscription across the poems and etchings, approaching the images not as illustrations or representations of the text but as spatial configurations of encounter—between readers, listeners, makers, and witnesses. Attendance as a gesture of attention becomes palpable when the poet imagines that “the poem is pneumatically touchable” and that “the reader breathes into the poem.” In this turning-towards-the-poem, the etchings invite a reading of the poet’s gesture as it inclines toward another practice and medium. My interest lies in how, within this publication, both media affect and reorient one another, generating a shared space of reading. Extending this form of listening means approaching the relation between word and image as the opening of spaces of attention—listening as inclination, as stance, before any immediate attempt of translation.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we, in our role as lecturers, conducted hybrid workshops with design and art students from ten partner institutions on five continents. Our goal was to explore soundscapes from different viewpoints, and we were deeply impressed by the outcome. The recordings and their accompanying images and conversations dissolved geographical borders along with social, cultural, and structural differences. We found that a re-sonance or con-sonance emerged from this collective work, in which sounds became manifestations of presence and agency; the sociality and simultaneity of the space we shared together remains with us today. With becoming soundscape, we attempted to bring the social resonance we had experienced in the workshops into the lecture hall.