WORK DESCRIPTION
“Where Are We Now? Where Are We Now? Where Are We Now?” is a site and context-specific performative installation, a continual PhD development that also responds to an invitation to present the research in dialogue with PhD candidate Magnhild Øen Nordahl. The work was developed to fit within the context of Nordahl’s Open Studio exhibition at Gallery Entrée in Bergen, March 2022.
The work consists of a white rope grid structure that fit inside Nordahl’s ‘Flexible Interior’ exhibition. [1] The rope grid surrounded an audience seated to watch a lecture presentation. The installation also included a projected, interactive’ video mirror’, augmenting the audience within a inversed, moving line and a projected PowerPoint presentation with a 3D model of Gallery Entrée made by Nordahl, a moving hypercube, and videos of moving white lines.
The first part of the presentation was conducted in a lecture-style format, where I, as the artist-researcher, introduced the performative installation as 'a context inside of other contexts': Gallery Entrée, normally a white cube, served as the contextual frame for the flexible interior built by Nordahl, which in turn framed the rope installation and performative presentation.
The lecture then proceeded to unpack thematic content that Nordahl and I had discussed in PhD reading groups, focusing primarily on ways to abstract and de-abstract, and the digital mathematization of our surroundings. I also discussed how the interdimensional movement I work with can be articulated as a way to fold contexts into each other, and context into content, subject into object. I introduced Donna Haraway’s suggestion of being aware of the contextual narratives we use to express and think with—what 'stories tell the stories'—and then, in response to PhD presentations that often rely on academic concepts as frameworks for reflection, I shifted to reflect my methods through a personal story retold to me by Marie Sikveland from Bergen. Sikveland had been affected by an abstraction: a condition of 'visual tinnitus,' where she saw white lines on her retina, a phenomenon that profoundly influenced how she interacted with her environment.
The performance then narrated how Sikveland’s daily life was affected and slowly began to fall apart due to this visual impairment. While recounting this in a personal, conversational tone, I began to physically interact with the rope grid and also invited the audience to slowly unravel the rope structure. By the end of the performance, the rope was down, the lights were out, and white projected lines appeared on the wall, as I narrated how Sikveland entered one of the growing lines and flattened out / expanded to become the whole surrounding room around the audience.
In darkness, with an amplified voice as if coming from the walls, I then described how it felt to spread out and become a room, and how, as a room, one holds the feeling of care and commitment to be still/step back, so as to support the content.
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
Through the development of this work, I explored how to performatively activate both the artistic methods and the mediation of the artistic research, thereby entangling reflection with the artistic result. I did this by engaging SPECULATIVE INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENTS within the performative installation to explore how to shape both the textual mediation and the spatial context of that mediation.
Here, I actively reflected with the folding hypercube, hoping that the performative installation itself would fold in a similar way. I aimed to engage this movement through the overlapping of digital augmentation, speculative fabulation in text/monologue, as well as physical movement and the dismantling of the ropes.
Through the extended artistic and reflective conversation with Nordahl, I also explored the folding of works within other works, creating a multidimensional piece where contexts were folded into each other.
This development continued to explore rope as a material LINE that could be installed in different constellations to examine direction, connection, and delimitation in SPACE. Additionally, it explored how the rope structure could adopt the aesthetic of a neutral three-dimensional model, onto which various specific meanings could be projected through narrative.
To entangle the movement in narrative with the movement in space, I rehearsed the performance along the lines of the rope grid, developing actions that supported the content of the story. Additionally, I explored how the audience could actively take part in unravelling the rope structure as I talked about the psychological collapse of Marie Sikveland.
I also explored how to entangle the LINEAR across a digital screen PLANE as well as in the installation SPACE. As such, the digital, interactive aesthetics were engaged as illustrative support for the content of the lecture and also as a way to animate the dimensions, extending them beyond the concrete, physical space and making the installation hover between the actual and the virtual. This exploration also reflected how digital augmentation could act as a 'shadow' of the linear rope structure within the space.
It was important that the digital lines MOVED in real time in response to the audience and performer, in parallel to how the rope grid responded to our physical movements. The effect of this digital and physical interactivity was meant to immerse the audience more actively and emotionally as parts of the speculative, interdimensional premise of the work.
Through engaging with Marie Sikveland’s experience, I got to embody the internalisation of dimensional abstractions (of lines, planes, and space) and aesthetically reflect on how that could operate in parallel to the more physical, tactile interaction with ropes as lines in the gallery space.
I also realised the importance of the SPECULATIVE INTERDIMENSIONAL folding of the work to be both abstracted on the one hand and contextually or site-specifically situated on the other.
By exploring the narrative of seeing lines on the retina—a condition that exists between physical sensation and cognitive experience—and developing this into the SPECULATIVE FABULATION of a woman becoming a room, I investigated how performative installations could transcend realistic dimensionality. This narrative structuring allowed me to examine how these dimensional spaces could be pushed beyond the boundaries of reality and move the impossible towards the possible. Ultimately, this exploration aimed at a suspending experience for the audience, to elicit reflections beyond conventional limits, possibly inviting reflections on how psychosomatic effects, mental concepts, and digital models all influence our perception and experience of actual reality.
In developing this speculative spatial folding towards the end of the performance, I explored how to give subjective agency and voice to a larger context. This focus on the environment marked an important development in the PhD, as it began to shift the research towards distributing human agency and giving voice to larger, more-than-human beings.
As such, a strange hyperspatial folding of content and context started to happen to the whole PhD, as its thematic premise changed while arising out of the formal and aesthetic restructuring of the work.
CONTRIBUTIONS
- Magnhild Øen Nordahl: PhD candidate and conversation partner, inviting me into her exhibition and research project.
- Galleri Entrée and Randi Grov Berger: Hosting the performative installation and event. Randi also took photos of the event used for documentation.
- Beate Poikane and Erla Auddunsdottir: Secret performers, helping the communal rope handling along.
- Siavash Kheirkhah: Video documentation.
[1] The ‘Flexible Interior’ installation comprised movable modules of blue and red shelves, furniture, research objects, and books, and was set up by Nordahl as a physical context to share her PhD research.
For a detailed description of development see the reflection page.
