Research Catalogue

This is an archiving project initiated by Siobhan Davies Studios, UK. The Archiving of the performance work "Truth and Transparency" Questions what it means to archive dance as well as what happens when a dance is archived acknowledging that some types of choreographers' work have historically been archived while other types of choreographers have not. What does it do to a dance and choreographer to be archived? This project is also interested in the changes in the creative process of performing the dance which was first choreographed in 2007 and is now being given new life through this archiving project. Truth & Transparency (2007): a performance work for three (two performers and one dancer manipulating projected image onto the performance space using a mirror). The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing up their own children as two masculine presenting Black youth at the time. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms as well as foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time. I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions. Much of Janine Antoni's work is about the female body and cultural identity.

This project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an “input” like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing inter­disciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up the—rightly or wrongly supposed—“ivory tower of contemporary composition”, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non-western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of “the other”). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (project co-leader, senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences. Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.

What is the sound of disability? What is the sound of a body that defies and resists normative standards? And further, is disability an instrument and, ultimately, virtuosity itself? For me, these have been everlasting questions. I acquired a disability at the age of seven from a car accident that impaired my left hand. Following the accident, I transitioned from various musical instruments to find one I could adapt to. More recently, this has led to engaging with various music technologies that fit my body. Specifically, I am searching for an instrument that fits rather than resists my body and signals my disability as an asset rather than a deficit in searching for my own virtuosity. Therefore, this article details my interest in reimagining virtuosity through the intersection of disability and digital music technology. I will describe my experience with the MUGIC gestural device (developed by Mari Kimura) and preliminary results from experimenting with the MUGIC. I will include background on the crux of virtuosity and the usefulness of mapping for reimagining virtuosity, as well as musical results and concluding thoughts regarding virtuosity, music technology, and disability. Lastly, I will argue that “cripping” virtuosity involves a widening understanding of what virtuosity can signify, realize, and magnify, cultivating what is curious, authentic, and at the core of art-making -- a fundamental self-expression beyond comparison and not easily replicated and a virtuosity true to oneself.

In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.