Performative Symposium for Ecological Spectatorship
(2018)
author(s): Juriaan Achthoven, Rhian Morris
published in: Research Catalogue
This page consists of the program of the Performative Symposium for Ecological Spectatorship, that took place on the 16th of October in Het Huis Utrecht.
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The symposium is organised by Gaia’s Machine: an upcoming artistic research collective exploring the intersection between art, technology and nature. Aims for the symposium are:
- Exchange knowledge between arts and sciences leading to a cross-fertilization of ideas and practices related to ecological spectatorship
- Reflect on our positioning as young artists & scientists at a time of ecological crisis
- Open a space for a young generation to question our responsibility and to explore potential methods of moving forward
The term ecological spectatorship draws awareness towards humanity’s entanglement within an ecological web. We approach ‘ecology’ from an ethical perspective, addressing the responsibility we have as a human species in relation to the earth (our oikos). Furthermore, we focus on ‘spectatorship’ – a branch within theatre studies that is concerned with the relation between makers and performers and the audience. We emphatically include the spectator in the performative space. Ecological spectatorship expresses a concern that in our view is not only relevant for theatre makers but also for politically engaged scientists.
In the symposium we will not only take the placement of the spectator into account but we will allow the spectator to become actively engaged in making sense of ecological spectatorship. We are keen to create ample space for the audience to reflect on their experience and to open an exchange of knowledge between both objective and embodied knowledge, and between the collaborators as well as the audience.
We will be researching the proposition of ecological spectatorship through the form of a performative symposium – a play on the traditional form of the symposium by making it both artistic and participatory.
Improvising Touch
(2018)
author(s): Vincent Meelberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Sound examples for Improvising Touch
Wormhole Workbook
(2018)
author(s): Mariana Nobre Vieira
published in: Research Catalogue
301 Research Semester Workbook
SODA MA HZT/UDK Berlin
April - July 2018
HISTORY NOTEBOOK
(2018)
author(s): Patti Fraser, Flick Harrison
published in: Research Catalogue
The question: whom do you walk with? Was put to me as a way to reflect on the history of my practice as a community engaged artist over the last part of the twentieth century living on the west coast of Canada. This interactive research space is an attempt to respond to an alternative notion of history and the influences on this art form over the course of thirty years. It also seeks to acknowledge the communities of people this art practice allied itself with. These people and their communities often lived outside and beyond the margins of the national narrative of history and its parade.
It is my hope this site offers a pedagogical space that invites students, researchers, educators, artists, and others to consider the questions that populate and characterize socially engaged arts practice and arts based research. The author’s reflections and writings captured at the roots of this reflection range from videos, poetic inquiry, reports, and scholarly essays on the nature of my experience of working in this field.
Gatherings
(2018)
author(s): Annelies, Alice De Smet
published in: Research Catalogue
‘Gatherings’ are the second level of operation of the doctoral study ‘Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures’. The first level of operation is called ‘responsive walking’ and is of direct embodied immersion of the author/learner’s bodymind while looking for the mess in urban environments and adopting a micro-perspective by means of walking and embodied creation. The second level departs from the assumption that embodied immersions in mess by responsive walking are desettling and urge sense-making. By creating video-assemblages, performance-lectures and conversation pieces processes of embodied sense-making are explored. Thereby, the challenge is to avoid the pitfalls of quick dichotomic, hierarchic and disembodied understandings of bodymindly engaging with the environment. To resist slipping into these categories – that are so readily present when sense-making is discursively elaborated – the notion of ‘pregnantness’ and the notion of a ‘propelling hypothesis’ are proposed. The former is a bodymind state that allows to imaginatively presence not-yet and becoming significances of embodied engagements with environments. The latter is an operative design instrument that allows the responsive shifts in hypothesis to become the very mechanism of a form-giving practice that reflects whimsicalities and contingencies. In order to work towards ‘pregnantness’ and follow the ‘propelling hypothesis’, gatherings interweave autobiographical, fictional and referential voices (i.e. the work of others) through one another. Also different media (i.e. body, drawing, writing, photo, video, sound, animation, modelling), low-tech assembling and analogue-poetic thinking are put into action to bring more sensory, ephemeral, affective and imaginative aspects of bodymindly relating to the environment into account.