This project investigates how scientific/mathematical models of physical dimensions and their interrelationships, can be used as a generative tool in artistic practise-based research. The exploration is situated within a cross disciplinary arena, that incorporates artistic strategies from New Media Art, Interactive installation, and Performance Lectures, and merge them into an expanded site, that I have chosen to call a “performative installation”.
Throughout, I am engaging with digital, narrative, speculative, and performative practises, to investigate how interdimensional movements can work as reflective tool within these performative installations.
Sidsel Christensen is a visual artist and currently PhD research fellow at The Art Academy, KMD in Bergen. While remaining a working relationship throughout Scandinavia and the UK, Sidsel holds a BA from Goldsmiths (2006) and MA from the Royal College of Art (2010)in London respectively.
She maintains a crossdisciplinarity focus, that traverses the artistic areas of New Media and Installation, and engages in spatial, textual and performative practices. Currently, her research is manifested in the arena of “performative installations”, consisting of bigger audio / visual assemblages in the gallery, that create a framework for performative gestures and interactions.
Sidsel has presented her work in range of art institutions and contexts, amongst others Stavanger Art Museum, Kunsthall Stavanger, Rogaland Kunstsenter, KINO KINO, Kunstnerenes Hus, Perfomence Art Bergen, Gallery Entrée in Norway, as well as The Institute of Contemporary Art (UK), Photo London (UK), The Tetley (UK), Hjellegjerde Gallery (UK), David Roberts Art Foundation (UK), VEGA ARTS (DK), X and Beyond (DK), CPH:DOX (DK) Ancharpark (DE) and Insitu (DE) and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
A central driver for the project has been a focus on how the concept of higher dimensions, or Hyperspace, can be conducive in this enquiry? How might it be possible to apply textual narrative fabulation and digital interactive augmentation, to move the art audiences into Hyperspace? Can this interdimensional speculation, towards the borderline of the possible, offer access to new folded perspectives and allow us to relate to what is otherwise occluded to us?
Along the way, this research focus has led to strange, folding movements in the “performative installations”, between the imaginary and the actual, the internal and the external, the subject and its context. Concurrently, the project has been increasingly occupied with a new-materialist notion of how to give voice to these interdimensional / intermedial installations, literally turning them into more-than-human beings, that talk and express themselves through the media-modalities of the work.
For this 3rd Forum presentation, I will share the development of this research trajectory, and present various more-than-human beings that has arisen out of project. It will be possible to meet them and listen their perspectives on how it is to exist as larger entangled beings, environments, or worlds. There might also be an opportunity to hear what they think about being part of a research project, and if they want to offer some artistic reflections towards the final submission of the PhD.
Currently, I am focusing on how the concept of Hyperspace be conducive in this enquiry? How is it possible to apply textual speculation and digital interactivity, as a means to traverse the borderline between the material and the informational, and offer access to impossible movements and new folded perspectives, that aid our reflection on the relationship between mind and body, subject and surroundings.
For this 2nd Forum presentation, I will share the methodologies, reflections and ethical dilemmas that are in play while working with the project “The panel of Hypersubjects”. Here a group of participants explore how to enter the minds of larger more-than-human networks, through live action role play (LARP), as well as researching how this play can be set inside of responsive installations of sensors, programming and video projections – that then make up the bodies of these larger network minds.
While exploring this with the groups in the performative installations, I seem to be working towards articulating a form of expanded relationality and investigate how these hyperspatial modulations, can offer the performance-participants a way to experience shifts in their fundamental ontologies. In other words, if the work can offer alternative ways to relate, between humans and the more-than-human, including ecologies and networks of digital technology.