{poz 230319}
ludvig 23 Feb 2023
developed a sense of what sonic qualities (textures) would invite dance or movements
preciousness, liminality, no sweetspot, renegotiation of you, your body, the acoustic space, highlighting subjectivty of listening, any presence matters, you cannot just observe without changing
when audience is present, the work becomes different
feedback as a process (phenomen) recalls the sense of touch. bidirectionality: affect and being affected. encountering
spatiality non only as something that envelopes you, but as volumetric quality.
opening up a process. it is the actual presence of people that make it go or not go
liminal state: you want the external input or whatever you have to /matter/
ecologies that we can navigate especially in the public space
agency: what are they allowed to do? what are they aware they are doing?
inventory: how we deal with space? how we conceptualize the cocreation of space, what kind of invitation we offer for the people we engage for art?
January 2023
In January 2023 I joined simularr, and I got to know we would spend two weeks In Hotel Pupik, Scheifling, Austria for an artistic research residency with the invited artists. I was in Hotel Pupik already in 2022, visiting the Swap Space pilot project, which also spent a week in residency in April 2022. From my short visit, I was mostly impressed by the big windows on the first floor. One opens directly on a stone wall, separated by a narrow non-paved path. The other offers a bucolic view on the valley, up to the far away mountains. The two windows are almost identical in size, but they radically differ in the way they frame the relationship between the interiors of the castle with the outside environment. One is bricked up, suggesting one should remain in the castle. In the other one, the view extends over kilometers, almost calling for jumping outside and run towards that points on the horizon where the sun sets at the end of the day.
When I got to know I would have been back in Pupik, I felt I needed to do something with these windows. Yet I didn't have any more precise idea, at this point. I have a fascination for windows in general, and some years ago I composed a site-specific piece for the window niche in Reagenz, Graz.
February - March 2023
Preparing for the research residency in Hotel Pupik
In February and March 2023 we had several online meetings with the Simularr core team + interval 1 invited artists. Preliminar encounters to get to know each other and to prepare for the intensive weeks in Hotel Pupik. Each encounter was curated by a single person, who would present his / her own work and introduce relevant themes to discuss together. During these encounters, I was taking notes about things that resonated with my interests, and I collected them here. From time to time, I went back to read these notes, rethinking about what the others presented. I began filtering certain ideas, finding what to me felt like more well defined points of contact between my practice and their practices, and also in-between their ideas. I got interested in such points of contact and started thinking whether I could formulate a work or proposition that would somehow emerge at their intersection. These points of contacts are highlighted in red in the notes below.
{poz 230319}
charlotta 07 Mar 2023
treasure hunting:
collection of collected experiences
donate more time or leave?
devoting time consciously, not being ingulfed.
clear freedom around how long to stay
consciousness about donating time for your own experience
feeding the treasure hunt
expand the treasure hunting system
3rd level: if you stay more time you can expand the system
4rth level: email sent three weeks after attendance
re-live experiences from their own structures
re-do something from an other perspective
walking through segmentation
create a possibility but also encourage to take different perspectives,
liberating creating a friction with established practices, linear temporality of theater
bring sound from far
live situations being enfrictioned with mediated experiences
glitch art - creating glitches that make you more aware, or questioning, where you are in time and space
iterative video walk - glimpses of development over time
why third person perspective
to make a cocktail is good to have a sparkling cone hat
friction between reality and the (constructed) situation
shy contribution
friction: what is supposed to happen (in terms of dramaturgy)
other temporal logic -> making transparent those other logics
undo the (theatrical) rules
being in two places at the same time
keeping up in two systems at the same time
take a second look
poz 10 05 2023
This page traces the development of an intermedia project called Ongoing Experiment, and it also collects the transitional artefacts produced along the way. Ongoing Experiment is still ongoing, it is still transitional and uncertain. It is also a new way of working for me, therefore I would like to keep it open and uncertain as long as possible, to let new possibilities and ideas grow in my practice. Despite the uncertainties, Ongoing Experiment generated already a few moments of crystallization which are also outlined in this page. Ongoing Experiment was also shaped by sharing ideas, propositions and conversations with the researchers involved in Simularr Interval 1. In exposing its development, I keep a focus on how these interactions were central in how things unfolded.
less direct influences are marked in red
more direct influences are marked in green
Ongoing Experiment timeline
Ongoing Experiment was mainly developed during the Simularr artistic residency at Hotel Pupik, Scheifling Austria from April 10th 2023 to April 23rd 2023. The links below point to different moments of its formulation and actuation.
Jan-Apr 2023 First ideas -- Simularr Interval 1 preparatory phase
10-12 April -- Preliminary instructions draft
13 April -- Reformulating with Charlotta
14 April -- Feedback session with Emma
14 April -- Test run with Charlotta
15 April -- Recording instructions with Charlotta
{poz 230319}
franziska 17 Mar 2023
going through different spaces, pass *through* people, to go where you want to
Haus Beer (Josef Frank): house like a city
- narrow passages, piazzas, etc
- link inside to the outside with special view
- bigger windows, smaller windows
- view is framing how the outside is connect with the inside
palladio
- windows / doors correlations
- correlations between the inside and the frame picture into the outside
PUPIK
- window niches /'/ a space inside a space
Ludvig
the map vs the actual world
personification of places in gothic literature
In her presentation, Franziska spent some time talking about how windows frame the relationship between the inside and the outside in different architectural contexts. Here I found an immediate resonance with my initial interest in doing something with the windows in Pupik, but I also understood that maybe the window was just an excuse for me to work on the relationship between the inside and the outside. This relationship is something important for me, and a very personal theme that I don't normally share with people. Some years ago I wrote a text about inside and outside (for the Algorithmic Segments catalogue), in which there might be a glimpse of what I don't normally talk about. Anyway, I let these ideas sink in, undecided whether to work with windows, with inside and outside, or with both.
From Ludvig presentation, I was particularly intrigued by the analogy he mentioned between the feedback phenomen and the sense of touch. In my thought process, this analogy started to grow into two directions: 1. intertwined with the inside and outside relationship: where do the inside and outside touch, what kind of exchange happens at that liminal point, how do they mutually affect each other? 2. how to transfer this analogy to the act of listening, what does it mean to touch and being touched when listening?
Charlotta talked about reliving experiences from their own structures, redoing something from another perspective. For some reason, this triggered the memory of one of my first experiences with a bone conduction headset. I tried bone conduction three years ago for the first time, and at first listen I was greatly impressed by the sonic illusion of a sound source that is neither inside your ears, nor outside of them. When wearing bone conduction, the ears are free and in direct contact with the outside world. At the same time, you can play back sound by directly letting the ear bones vibrate through transducers. This was very confusing for me at the time, because it creates a listening experience that is different from the two categories I was used to: either sound in your ears (hearphone, earphones), separating your ear from the outside environment, or sound outside (loudspeakers or other sound sources). In some way, the first time I tried bone conduction was a liminal experience for me, because it blurred the boundary of listening: I couldn't tell whether I was listening inside or outside. Short after that I did some experiments with bone conduction by playing back recordings of city soundscapes while watching the traffic through my kitchen window. I remember being surpisingly confused by this superimposition of other perspectives, experiences and structure with the actual sonic environment happening in real-time outside my kitchen. This memory came back when Charlotta was talking about re-living experiences from their own structures, and I decided to order a new bone condution headset for Pupik - my old headset broke two years ago while playing basketball.
Thinking more about the fact that bone conduction leaves the ears open, I realized that that opening might be used in the opposite direction to metaphorically emulate the sense of touch. Touching, while being touched, listening, while being listened. At this point the idea came about to combine bone conduction with binaural microphones. I thought it could be interesting to combine the act of listening and recording with the act of listening to a previous act of listening and recording. Superimposing experiences to enfriction the act of listening itself, and blurring the boundary between the now and past, the inside and outside.
Charlotta also talked about treasure hunting, and collection of collected experience. This made me realize that combining binaural microphones with bone conduction could provide a channel for interweaving personal experiences of listening, also blurring the boundary between different people acts of listening. I liked the collaborative practices that Charlotta exposed in her presentation, and I began to think about how to translate some aspects of that into the sound domain.
These thoughts all came together a few days before Pupik. The bone conduction headset was delivered at my place one day before our departure to Scheifling. At this point I knew I wanted to try some kind of relay stucture of shared listening and delayed togetherness. This seemed like a good idea, especially in the last days before the residency when we had many conversation about common exercises and togetherness, but also about the practical schedule complications implied in sharing time all together. The listening relay seemed like a good compromise to transpose a sense of delayed togetherness, while at the same time providing a format that each person could experience at his / her own pace and time, independent from the others.
14th April - Charlotta's test run
Charlotta found three places. After recording, she came back to me. She brought me to all the places she found and we talked throughly about what she felt and imagined. After this conversation I understood that the ongoing experiment could be a vehicle to access a certain form of intimate exchange and conversation with the participants. That's when I decided to add the third step (visit the found places and discuss it together).
knowing vs feeling a place or situation
sensing somebody else than you
jackets make sound
in stillnes it is very difficult to distinguish between my ears and your ears
when I didn't know where you were it was more exciting
first: following my ears
then: following the map of what I am feeling
re-exploration of what you experienced
confusion when I didn't know where you were
incompleteness gives space to others
10 April 2023
So we arrive in Pupik. At this point I knew I needed an invitation to ask people whether they wanted to try the listening relay. Or a soft invitation, to use the simularr lexicon. I also needed instructions for people to follow while performing the listening relay. I thought that the invitation / instructions could have been more appealing if I would have found a way of embedding all the influences that let the listening relay idea emerge. I began writing, but I was just being frustrated by my own words. Worlds. I could not find a set of instructions that felt welcoming enough. The draft I arrived at is in yellow on the right.
12 April 2023
That night I was in the kitchen with Ludvig and Charlotta. Knowing she works with instructions, I asked:
D: Are you good at writing instructions?
C: Yes, that's my job.
D: Then I would like to ask for your help tomorrow.
15 April 2023
morning
On Saturday morning Charlotta helped me recording the invitation. We sat next to each other on the sofa in front of the big window upstairs, looking to the nature outside. The sofa later became the starting point for each experiment run. She was wearing the binaural headset. She pressed record and I read the text. We also recorder some instructions that would be played back through the bone conduction device, at the beginning of Step 3 (30 mins recording slot).
noon
Since Franziska was leaving on Saturday, I proposed her to take part in the experiment on Friday. I assembled the first playback for her - the 30 mins binaural recording I received from charlotta on Thursday + instructions at the beginning of the sound file.
13 April 2023
The day after, me and Charlotta set on a bench behind the tower of the old castle ruins for some hours, facing the pine tree factory. I explained the idea of the listening relay. She listened to me carefully, and I felt very welcomed. At a certain point she asked something like:
C: Ok, but what do you see between the inside and the outside?
D: If you want to know the answer, you better know beforehand this will be a very personal conversation.
C: If you want to do art you have to be personal.
I told her the story of the inside and outside, and it felt way too real to the point that it became unreal. Later that day, around midnight, we were both working on our laptop in the kitchen of Hotel Pupik.
C: You got mail.
I opened the email and there it was. The perfect invitation / instructions, embedding all the story of the inside and outside without really mentioning it. The way she could condense that into a text that was evocative and true to my person at the same time was very touching. At this point I didn't feel only welcomed, but also deeply understood, and I was surprised that I could get to this level of intimacy with a person whom I met just a couple of days before.
14 April 2023
afternoon
On Friday we asked Emma for feedback on the text invitation. Me, Charlotta and Emma sat on the three chairs in corner at the entrance of the barns upstairs. Emma found the text very evocative and inviting. We also talked about the more general framework I was envisioning for the experiment. Originially I thought about this structure:
(Step 0) I would announce that an audio invitation for the ongoing experiment was available in the common shelf.
Step 1. People could simply go to the shelf, pick up the audio device and listen to the invitation.
Step 2. They would then continue with their activities - hopefully - keeping an eye on those things the invitation suggest to pay attention to.
Step 3. Once people found something, they could come to me at their own convenience, to communicate they were ready for the recording step of the experiment.
I thought this loose open structure was nice because it would allow people to take part in the experiment at their own pace, proceeding step by step once they felt ready to do so. Emma didn't really agree on this:
E: When things are too open or loose, I simply don't do them. Things that are not scheduled, I tend to push them at the end of the day, and then I forget about them.
This comment was very important and it made me realize that having the freedom of choosing "when" to do something gives also the freedom of "not" doing it, of forgetting to do it. In a way, I had a similar feeling with the "soft invitation" propositions that we tried out in Pupik. I often forgot to peek into the common shelf, I often overlooked the greenboard in the garden.
What's the boundary between a soft invitation and a normal invitation? At which point things get too much loose and open?
This question was too complicated to address in a short time. I decided to follow Emma's suggestion of packing the whole experiment in a single run. Each run would last around two hours, and the steps (listening to the invitation, searching for what is evoked through the invitaiton and then recording it) would be strictly packed one after the other.
evening
In the afternoon me and Charlotta had a test run of the experiment. I recorded one hour, I then hooked her up to the bone conduction headset in which my recording was playing back, and to the binaural headset so that she could record at the same time. She also walked around Pupik recording for an hour. Afterwards we met again and she brought me in the places she found.
D: Did you feel it, or did you imagine it?
We talked a lot about her experience with the experiments and about the things she found. Hanns Holger was spontaneously sponging us at this time, but he looked very pensive and I had the feeling he didn't understand what we were talking about. The interesting, very personal conversations made me realize that the experiment had also the potential of providing a special access to a certain kind of intimacy with the participants. I thought this intimacy was valuable, therefore I decided to add one last step to the experiment, in which I would ask people to bring me to the places they found, and tell me about it. At this point, I finally had a convincing structure. Each experiment run would take two hours, divided into this sequence:
1. LIsten to the invitation.
2. Look for physical, mental or emotional places associated to the invitation.
3. Re-visit those place while wearing the bone conduction and binaural headset (30 min strict).
4. Bring me to the found places and tell me about it.
15th April - Franziska's session
In the afternoon I had the first Ongoing Experiment session with Franziska. She found three places. We had a touching conversation about the wind, and she shared with me an extremely personal memory about a day in which she felt a breeze on her face, similar to the moment in which she was sitting on the sofa in front of the big window.
# not-sides
This proposition is a preliminar attempt at condensing some thoughts that I collected throughout our first encounters and conversations. It is an attempt at translating them into a procedure, a scheme of working, that might eventually lead to a piece. It is an attemp at finding a personal method of self infection, letting other practices affect my way of working. It is also an attempt at providing you with an altered, personal access to my practice. And it is an invitaion for you to get in touch with my practice through your lens, at your pace, but in some kind of asynchronous embodied togetherness.
In other words, this proposition is an experiment that combines some of my current interests with some inputs I collected during our encounters.
This invitation might be about:
- touch and being touched, encountering
- treasure hunting / collect experiences
- preciousness, liminality
- re-live experiences from their own structures
- deferred togetherness
- embodied asynchronous simultaneity
- liminal spaces of listening
- highlighting subjectivty of listening
- framing how the outside is connected with the inside
- a space inside a space
- windows as links
The invitation works as follow:
- during our stay I would ask you to pay attention to liminal places or situations in which you are neither inside nor outside, or to specific places which are themselves neither inside nor outside (not-sides). In particular, listen to how you perceive such places or situations
- whenever you feel like, you might come to me and tell me that you have found something
- I will then hook you up to two sound devices: a bone conduction headset and a binaural microphone headset. I will ask you to go and record your not-side for at least one hour. You begin from your individuated not-side, and then you can either decide to stay there, or move and explore further. Follow your ears and your not-sides
- While you are recording through the binaural set, you will simultaneously ear a previous recording of somebody else's not-side through bone conduction. This will accompany you throughout your recording session
- Once you are done, you can come back to me. We'll collect your recording and have a little chat
In parallel, I will probably be working with images of not-sides, and with other sounds in general.
Ideally I would like to gather one recording per day, so that everyone has the opportunity of recording twice over the course of the two weeks.
Ongoing Experiment invitation
This is about paying attention through your ears. A soft
invitation to share my curiosity in listening. I realised that for
me it’s also about how to be in and outside of an experience at
the same time. The situation I want you to search for has
something to do with touching and being touched but also
about postponing that touch. Maybe think about the
experiment as a dream where you walk around in third person
listening to the world. Somewhere in this dream there is a
place where you’re not only an observer. You’re sort of both
inside and outside at the same time. At this border between in-
and outside I think there might be something precious to share
between us. I have tried to give it a name, but as my ears bring
me to both actual spaces and places in my mind most words
seem to be too narrow. For now let’s just look for that in-
between-space. Follow your ears. Not inside not outside. An
“in-between side” of some kind. You decide when and what it
is for you. When you have found something between in or
outside of you or the world, the next few steps of this
experiment will come. They are simple: 1. find me, 2. Share
that situation in delayed togetherness. In case you want to
listen to this invitation one more time please do, otherwise
please leave the device here for somebody else to attend and
follow their ears.
16th April - Emma's session
Emma found one place. She sat on a tree which grows at the point where Pupik's garden leans into a small ditch. While sitting in this position, it is possible to observe people in Pupik without being noticed. At the same time, the spot is not completely hidden. It is also possible that people would by chance notice one's eyes popping out of the pit. It is an in-between site that for Emma relates to the boundary between solitude and intimacy, between the desire of being together and the wish to be distant. She recalls she had a similar spot in her parents' countryside house, as a kid. At that time she was very introverted, even with her own family. Sometimes, she preferred to be alone, but still observing her parents from a distance. Back then they had a bush with a hole in the middle, in the garden in front of their house. She would hid there and observe her family and her house. Nevertheless she was not completely invisible in the bush, and she knew that, in case somebody would look for her, they could easily find her. She felt a similar ambiguous feeling - the wish of observing without being noticed, but at the same time waiting for the moment she would be found - while sitting over the tree in the pit in Pupik. While she was describing these things to me, Hanns Holger could easily find us, looking from a window above. He took the picture below.
18th April - Ludvig's session
Ludvig found two places. But my feeling was that he didn't like the experiment, or maybe he didn't like Pupik on that day. We talked about emptyness and abandon, about being in a place in the off-season.
There is a stage but no one is playing.
There is a sound system but no sound.
There is a cinema but no audience.
The stage is closed.
The sound system is shut down.
Pupik is empty.
People left last summer.
Now it's winter.
No one wants to be here.
The second place Ludvig found was sitting at the piano upstairs. He told me he played the piano "to awaken the ghost", to make something happen.
The piano sounds bad.
Throughout the Ongoing Experiment I always asked people to bring me to the places they found. In this session it didn't feel right. We sat on Ludvig first place (the sofa in front of the big window) and I didn't ask him to bring me to the piano.
