Between November 2021 and March 2023, I composed music and designed sound for two external projects in film and VR. The artists, Yäniyä Mikhalina (Sisterless) and Mari Bastashevski (Pending Xenophora) were also PhD candidates at NTNU, fellow internationals working and teaching at Kunstakademiet i Trondheim (KiT). Each collaboration grew slowly from friendship and artistic dialogue before later developing into a defined work process.
I consider my contributions to Sisterless and Pending Xenophora to be the most surprising and welcome developments of the PhD period. Their collaborative work modes and clear external targets trained an essential aesthetic discernment at the intersection of sound and vision; a discernment previously dormant, and which performance-as-process, from its embodied ephemeral basis, could not fully activate.
This shift from performance to sound design proved fruitful. As a designer, the key ingredient is to notice. It allowed or required me to step back, to survey my own practice from a new angle. There's something here about the subjectivity-engine of performance as inescapable, a constant and slippery negotiation. When you perform, your presence and activity will always constitute the piece. Within the visual arts, we often strive to produce an autonomous result beyond immediate doing, independent of the artist's physical presence and daily fluctuations. Here, the negotiation of subjectivity becomes more possible.
In retrospect, it is remarkable how each project allowed me to tangle with many of my own research questions. Indeed, the sensibilities and skills developed in Sisterless and Pending Xenophora (and I would argue, the "deskilling") made the bipartite final result possible to conceptualize and acheive. Their work flows highlighted the spectrum or interaction between text, sound and music and pinpointed inroads to long-form or polyphonic composition. They dealt with presence, encounter, and the ethics of representation, with which it was later possible to turn back inward to the solo practice, grappling with the answers through the idea of visibility or "voicing" of performative presence. New questions arose which seemed cut from the same cloth as the old ones, questions on simultaneity and channels of perception, social and sensory function, and how to listen deeply to the material – to give the material "a chance to design itself".1
Not least, these projects sparked a pivotal learning curve when working with audio production and live electronics. Their tasks proved to be creatively stimulating, but called for huge swaths of know-how I did not yet have, providing the impetus to develop personalized strategies and crucial work flows within music technology and audio-as-material. It is not always obvious, as an acoustically trained instrumentalist, how to build an operative knowledge-base in those worlds. To avoid discouragement and disengagement, I seem to need two clear things: an intriguing design puzzle, and a deadline.
Luckily there was no lack of intrigue, design puzzles, or deadlines. Both projects found their premieres abroad in prototype form: Sisterless at the Lumbung cinema program for documenta15 in Kassel, Germany, and Pending Xenophora at the Brotfabrik Bühne Bonn theater for the ‘Digital Ecologies’ conference in Bonn, Germany. After revisions and additions, each was then presented again: Pending Xenophora at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, NL and Sisterless as the central work of an exhibition by the same name at Trondheim Kunstmuseum.
In the case of Sisterless, there was a long hiatus in production between the two versions, due in large part to the invasion of Ukraine. The work is a documentary and feminist film, almost entirely text-based, compiled from a series of phone conversations between the filmmaker and the protagonist, Albina, later set as monologue voiceover to footage of Albina, her family, and her environment. My job was to subtley push and pull the narrative, largely foregoing music, and to design (sometimes to literally re-construct) the sound space of the visible and psychological environment. The work process took time; including time to exist quietly with the reality and magnitude of Albina's life, interiority, and death.
Pending Xenophora, in contrast, hinged on speculative and imaginative research processes, a kind of world-building. The result was a multiverse in exhibition form, which the artist designed in collaboration with a rout of garden snails. At the center of the exhibition space stood an empty and ethereal inflatible structure, which formed the soft, enveloping stage for individual visits to the VR world. My job was to compose the voices of the snails encountered therein, as well as an ambient music for the exhibition space. All must be wordless; an accessible abstraction, but, like Sisterless, based in the framing of encounter – with character, mortality, with alternate modes of perceiving and synthesizing one's world. [sisterless - alternate to the hegemonic / PX - alternate to the anthropomorphic]
Production occurred in several rounds for both projects, building a much needed creative momentum in the second half of my PhD candidacy. We may conclude that, even within the framework of a long-term artistic research project, it is good and necessary to work for others.
The success of these collaborations highlight, in a positive way, the topic of immigration status and candidate labor within the ecosystem of the Norwegian Artistic Research Program. They also offer a starting point for discussing the ethics of reciprocity vs. monetary compensation, or the unclear lines between the salaried position of a researcher and their participation in the primarily freelance economy of the arts, which is in fact critical to the activity of "research through art" and hard to scrub of its economics. If afforded the legal basis to freelance as musician during my candidacy, my creative communities would have developed differently, which would have reflected in the final result. As is, I cherish the results of the professional constraint and the reorientation of energies it produced. The mode of designer is entirely unlike that of performer. If these years had been filled with musical collaborations and performances, as originally expected and hoped, I would not have had the space to grow a new identity.
My urge to engage with a music scene specific to Norway was originally framed as a research question about collaboration and orchestration. These topics found their answer in a totally different field where I did not yet have a professional status or role, and precisely due to that fact. It should be clear from the life of this project, that no artistic PhD process is self-contained, nor purely academic or institutional, and that the candidate's work status will undoubtedly determine who they work with, what processes they can undertake, and what is ultimately produced. Culture is a social product; producing it, a social process. We crave this engagement with other creatives over our collective work. Otherwise the well runs dry.
Navigate to each project's Sound Exposition for more about the piece, the process, and the sound world.
