HOW DO YOU WORK? Conversations, drawings and responses (Vienna) by Adelheid Mers

Preliminarily in 2012, and formally in 2013/14 , I asked experimental musicians and composers in Vienna "How do you work?". Based on those conversations, I created two drawings of what I call each artist's "epistemic engine", or the way I understood them to work. One drawing was a free form exploration, and the other mapped my notes onto the "Fractal 3-line Matrix", a diagrammatic instrument that emerged in my work in 2011, after the informal round of conversations. On sharing the drawings with them, artists were invited to produce a response in a medium of their choice. This project was supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.

Asking other artists "How do you work?", I initiate conversations that are extended through verbal, performative and material feedback loops. From a systems perspective, this inquiry explores the embraidedness of components of the work artists do: making, mediating and managing.

Each initial conversation leads into the creation of new works, in turn by myself and my collaborators that explicitly embody our reflections, responding to each other, in multiple media and modes. I am here working with sound artists and musician/composers, generating texts, drawings, diagrams, digital animations, videos, sound pieces, compositions and performances. In first working with creative musicians in Vienna, I have found that they, by necessity of their ubiquitous professional interdependence in producing their work, are highly attuned to the structures and systems they inhabit, and with this to the impact of personal, cultural and organizational formations on their modes of making, while in turn attempting to use and impact these structures in original ways. I aim to show how artists operate against, through, parallel to or in spite of discursive, technological and institutional strata. At the current stage, the process reflects this back to participants and other artist colleagues, through reflexive art works and accompanying texts, eventually encouraging a broader inquiry that is capable of foregrounding what is often still a tacit body of knowledge.

This current work is the extension of a collaboration that began during my 2012/13 sabbatical from SAIC, when a residency at A.I.R. Krems was preceded by a month-long Visiting Lecturer appointment at the Institute for Cultural Management at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (IKM/MDW). There, I began to work extensively with sound artists, musicians and composers, local or in residence at the university and/or ORF Kunstradio, many involved in arts doctorates, as well as a 'control group' of arts managers and theorists. One way to keep connections alive is through the Art/Research Conference at IKM/MDW, organized by Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies Doris Ingrisch.

As many musicians already worked with each other internationally, the project has been extended into Chicago and was facilitated here in part through my exhibition and 3 month summer residency at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2014 and continues through meetings and collaborative sessions at my studio.

Tip

Tip