Performing Precarity
(2024)
author(s): Laurence Crane, Anders Førisdal, LEA Ye Gyoung, Io A. Sivertsen, Lisa Streich, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.
Zoological Architectures and Empty Frames
(2024)
author(s): Katharina Swoboda
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In general, zoo architecture directs the attention towards the animals. The buildings create ‘frames’ around the animals, as John Berger (1980) states in his 1977 essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’. Following this premise, my work explores visual and psychological aspects of framing, relating to animal housing. Judith Butler (2009) explains how (visual) framings always create meanings and evaluations of what is enclosed within them. Therefore, the representation of animals in human culture affects how we treat animals socio-politically. Zoos generate and communicate ongoing conceptions of zoo animals. Zoo architecture, although often in the background of one’s field of vision, forms an important factor in the construction of these ideas.
Performance as Device for Disorientation
(2024)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
By its very nature, performance is precarious—there is always the chance that everything might fall apart. In an attempt to mitigate the discomfort of this unpredictability, many musicians develop strategies in the hope of holding the reins on the proverbial cart. But what if one chose not to maintain control and instead embraced the wild nature inherent to performance? What kinds of knowledge and aesthetic experiences might emerge in the inevitable moments of collapse? Drawing on her recent research in the project Performing Precarity, an extended collaboration with composer Simon Løffler, as well as concepts by Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, percussionist/performer Jennifer Torrence meditates on the notion of performance as a device for disorientation—that is, performance as an embodied practice of rupture, of getting lost, and of undoing the order of things.
Ta Form
(2022)
author(s): Klara Waara
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This research, developed in Amsterdam during the repeated courses of lockdown between 2020 and 2022, examines the powers and limitations of fantasy. Processing the mental and ideological undercurrents in Europe, the text describes a trajectory where the visual artist appropriates the role of a poet to explore the possibilities for change and movement in isolation. As thinking, reading and writing alters the protagonist, the appropriating artist becomes appropriated by language. The gradual blending with the observed subjects raises questions about the distinction between the internal and external.
Straying as Research
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Katharina Swoboda
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Katharina Swoboda
Straying as Research
My project deals with straying – specifically, with those animals to whom we usually attribute straying as a method: stray cats. They exist in almost all human population centers, although they are more noticeable in some cities than in others. In Vienna, they tend to operate in secret. Any search for strays opens up unexpected encounters, not only with cats, but with people and stories too. Stray cats may be part of the city, but they move along paths unknown to people. But what are the paths that they take? This project approaches straying with the help of media techniques such as video traps and GPS sensors on the one hand, and interviews and observations on the other.