‘It’s cowboy country up there’: Ruination and Ruinenlust in the wilds of Broughton
(2020)
author(s): Joanne Scott
published in: Research Catalogue
This article articulates and reflects on dual practices that arise from concurrently responding to my home locality through creative research and resident action. It considers these parallel practices through the dual notions of wildness and ruins/ruination. The critical writing is punctuated with artefacts of both practices, generating a mode of intermedial writing that, through placing these elements and critical reflection in direct conversation, allows feeling-thoughts to emerge about the process of researching a locality in which you are embedded, as well as the wild and ruined features of contemporary urban landscapes.
An Organological Approach to the History of the Flauto Piccolo with a Pre- and Post-Beethoven Analysis, Including the Complete Study of Beethoven’s Implementation of the “Ottavino”
(2020)
author(s): Rikki Wolpowitz
published in: Research Catalogue
This thesis is an organological approach to the role of the piccolo in the orchestration of compositions from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, classifying these periods as Pre-Beethoven, Beethoven, and Post-Beethoven. From research and review of the literature, composers and their compositions which specifically called for the use of the piccolo are tabulated and analyzed. The analysis is categorized into the evolution of the debutante piccolo, by observing its accomplishments by the following analysis of what the piccolo accomplished in that role: [1.] As an extender of range and dynamics; [2.] Programmatic effects achieved; [3.] Its inclusion in solo arrangements either within a movement or as the complete soloist; each of these concepts will be built into the Pre-, Beethoven and Post-Beethoven periods. For this thesis, the Pre-Beethoven period ranges from the possibility of Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (1567 – 1643) for ‘Flautino,’ written in 1607 to Mozart, including the military music of the French Revolution. The Beethoven period is covered by a discussion of the role of the piccolo in Beethoven’s orchestration dividing his career into his early period that has not been previously examined in any detail in existing research literature. His middle and late period including a re-examination of his symphonic works related to the piccolo from this authors perspective including his symphonic works follows. These include the Fifth Symphony, the Sixth Symphony, Egmont, and the Ninth Symphony. After that, the document examines the post-Beethoven period until its maturity into a solo instrument as conceived by Tchaikovsky in his 4th Symphony.
metamusic
(2020)
author(s): alien productions
published in: Research Catalogue
metamusic aims to develop interactive sound installations and electronic instruments for animals held in captivity. The project's target is to improve the animals’ quality of life, by designing an interactive musical environment that takes the specific needs and skills of the animals into consideration. metamusic, developed by the artists' group alien productions in collaboration with the zoologists and animal keepers of the ARGE Papageienschutz, centers its attention on grey parrots.
1 Day Artwork
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Net art for unrealized site-specific performing arts installation, 2020
The exposition shows fragments of work prepared for an unrealized interactive site-specific public installation at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, South London. The installation would include dance performance, video/photography and structures with objects.
The work was produced at different times between the winter and summer of 2011. The installation was to be a collaboration with dance artist Susanna Recchia and photographer Rachel Cherry. Audiences would traverse or remain on site as long as they wished.
The Critical Pathways workshop by choreographer and artist Rosemary Butcher served as the starting point. Walking journeys allowed for emerging themes, such as pilgrimage, walking-the-lifeline and potentiality. The concepts of the moving body and the plane tree, a variety imported into the city, became intertwined. The performers would enact processes related to journeying and nomadism. The installation would create a virtual landscape of remoteness: a place for reflection.
Revisiting these works, I draw from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming animal to suggest that we rethink the notion of animal via the concept of the plan(e)/plateau. Deleuze and Guattari's advancement of the notion of the plan(e), from a metaphoric articulation of processes of translation into a conceptual apparatus of intersection across forms, enables the co-existence of multi-dimensional multiplicities against their reduction to two dimensions. The plane is one of consistency that is sustained across multiplicities. If it is the plane of Nature in the Deleuzian sense of natural history, it allows for the infinite multiplicity of individuals. Entering the plan(e)/plateau, one becomes part of an individuated assemblage depending on their relations of movement.
In memory of Rosemary.
Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Play in the format of the philosophical dialogue, 2019
Drama is pretense. But, unlike fiction, a theatrical play is not a pretended representation of a state of affairs; rather it is the pretended state itself, in which the actors pretend to be the characters doing the pretending in the actual performance of the theatrical play. The actor is in this way irrealised in the character. Aside from writing the play, which consists largely in pseudo assertions, the playwright gives the actors directions on how to pretend to make assertions and to perform actions. Therefore, the playwright is writing a recipe for pretense. Instead of pretending to write assertions, the playwright gives directions to the actors on how to enact a pretense.
The philosophical dialogue has been an established, although uncommon, method of philosophical writing, which usually deploys fictional characters to present a discussion between several divergent viewpoints on a topic of ordinary or philosophical interest. The juxtaposition and debating of opinions in ordinary uses of language, without prioritizing any opinion, endows the dialogue with open-endedness instead of conclusiveness. As McKeon (in Prince, 1996: 3) argues:
"Dialogue is statement and counterstatement, based on ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through opinions about reality. Truth is perceived in perspective, and perspectives can be compared, but there is no overarching inclusive perspective."
In this exposition, I exploit the dialogic format to expose the views of Jean-Paul Sartre, a well known philosopher and father of the existentialist philosophical and literary movement, and Maurice Blanchot, a rather obscure philosopher of literature and literary critic. Notably, both Sartre and Blanchot were active in the post second world war period, which significantly shaped their philosophical insights; specifically on modes of writing, including fictional prose, about a variety of topics, from politics, to ethics and aesthetics. Because referencing is rarely used in philosophical dialogues, here I employ full bibliographical referencing in the end. The dialogue presents an advantage for reaching a wider readership, beyond the confines of those with strictly philosophical and academic interests.
Prince, Michael, "Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel video, 3’, 2008
The probe for the work was the philosophical question what it is to exist in the world: in environments, with others, people, objects, surfaces; and whether the answer can be intuited.
The work evokes the temporality of such experiences, which is contingent upon the ever-changing nature of things. Objects have often had multiple owners, and so they carry traces of previous worlds. When encountering objects new to us, we may find ourselves appropriating them through affective attachment to assimilate them into our world. Inspired by the everyday lives of the house's occupants, the work is also about the affective bonds developed during and because of their temporary co-existence.
Experimentation with overlaying resonates with the artistic expression of overlapping materials, textures, spatial qualities, and reflected images. Photographs, film footage and sounds were recorded in an improvised way over a one year period in an old house in Walthamstow, East London. The artistic treatment of the subject matter as a time-based media assemblage, which exploits the home style video format, critiques popular staged presentations of everyday life, while exploring the house as an evolving over time system.