A dance or a piece of music lives on by being passed over from one practitioner to another, and from practitioner to audience. In this process, passing through eye, ear, instrument, technology or score between practitioners and audiences, the work is both conserved and changed. Through this process the artwork can live on long after the involved individuals will.
The term tradition is often understood as conservative. Something we hold on to. However, the Latin origin traditio means handing over, not holding on. As something is handed over, it changes and it is with this transformational approach that RELAY looks at how artistic (im)materials are developed through exchange and hand-overs.
RELAYing artistic (im)materials is what assures their survival and protects the artform from stagnation. Every hand-over gives the possibility for re-iterations, and productive misunderstandings. Things can get lost in translation, but things can also be found in translation.
Next to the verb “to relay” the term exists as noun and refers to a group of people (or animals) engaged in a task or activity for a period of time and then replaced by a similar group. RELAY continuously formed new constellations of people throughout its unfolding and they all came to affect the content, form, ambiance, and direction of the projects, to then pass it on to the next group and encounter.
There are two fundamental ways that RELAY as a concept formed the entire project: Firstly, it is the basic conceptual and organizing principle of the project. Each partner gets to visit all partners, and the rotating role as host of LTTAs gave everyone the chance to make their own edition of the event, based on their local context. This gave each host a chance to look at its own context through the shared lens of RELAYing and at the same time a chance to reveal that same context to the visitors. As the hosting role got passed around, we learned from each other, through ideas, mistakes and inspirations of best practice.
The second element is the Time Capsule, which passes from one LTTA to the next. Each host selects what gets passed on to the next event.
The entire process gets documented and becomes one of the project results: the ARTwork.
TOOLS
on relaying
RELAYING (writing practice)
For the project outcome ARTicle we use the basic concept of Relay as a writing method. This is to assure a multiplicity of perspectives and to test our method in various contexts. It means we move away from the idea of one author and maybe even from co-writing to instead try a form of dissolved authorship, where everyone’s voice is heard but it is the words of no one. However, this still needs an organizing principle, which will be the role of the editor. The editor initiates the writing, gathering materials from collective discussions and writings to put a first draft together. The editor can ask for specific contributions from the others, or simply to get feedback on the draft. This will generate a first version of the text. This text will later be passed on from editor to editor, as a form of filtering that also allows the different texts to find a more similar tone. It will eventually land with one editor who sets the final version. There will be one text for each category in the Research Catalog presentation. The texts will be accompanied by other media such as, audio, video and imagery (photos and/or drawings).
WEAVING
A relay setting invented by one of the three groups of students in the second LTTA in Copenhagen resulted in an imaginative rendering of a weaving process, which addressed the presence and absence of representation as well as the intersection of technology and analogy. The arrangement chosen in Copenhagen combined the process of weaving with the technology of video. In doing so, it showed passages of a "weaver" whose sounds or movements had produced the translated designs of the earlier "weaver," which in turn were translated by the current weaver into newly transformed patterns. The video and audio recordings created an acoustic/visual relay that highlighted sound and movement as catalyzing creative material. It addressed the transformative nature of material - a video by musicians created through the translational designs of performers, in which they transformed the visual and aural codes applied to the material and translated them into sound and image, creating a feedback loop and the possibilities of communication.
In the frame of a seminar in Cologne - which served as an in-between event amongst the LTTAs in order to filter the knowledge of the RELAY project into the curriculum - the mentioned setting was slightly adapted. While in Copenhagen video material formed the starting point for the transformation process, in this process analogue materials from students in Cologne served as the starting point for the transformational process. Students from Bucharest transformed the given analog materials into digital compositions and re-layed them to the Cologne group at the end of the seminar. The process invited us to invest into the following questions: What potentials and scopes arise when we understand the materials as a starting point for scores? What dynamics and materialities unfold in the work? And how do composers deal with them in this function?
SMUGGLING
A trade through 'unauthorized routes‘… a purposeful movement of objects, substances, information across people in contravention to the relevant frameworks.
(tested in LTTA4)
MEANDERING
This practice presents the idea of "relaying/meandering"— wandering casually without urgent destination—as a way of framing a conversational creation process that can help loosen control without being out of control. Through the method proposed in this workshop we implement a creation and learning process that is not only pleasant and rewarding but also leads to a concrete action plan and agenda, to experience the highly relational, embodied, and contextual nature of relaying as a method.
In the RELAYproject collaborative inquiry and conversational learning are approaches to creating and learning in which participants construct knowledge together through dialogue. Both approaches advocate letting go of control, to allow insight and to emerge through free-flowing conversation. These approaches contradict expectations about learning among both teachers and students and raise fears of discussion degenerating into pointlessness.
(practiced in one of the workshops in the LTTA4 in Cologne)
RELAY/content/space/content
The itinerant and nomadic work mode of shifting work spaces during the day gave the working groups a chance to increase awareness of situational logics of each visited context. It also meant that in-between moments of shifting spaces were built in to the work, creating small gaps and time pockets for the unforeseen.
RELAY/content/form/content
In any artistic endeavor it can be productive to analyze the relationship between form and content. In the LTTA2 we used the overall conceptual structure of RELAY to propose a working format. This in turn affected what sort of content was produced. The form of the projects became a content for thinking the structure of the event, which in turn produced a form that affected the content produced. This back and forth analysis of form/content creates both organizational efficiency and fruitful frictions.
