WORK DESCRIPTION
“The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension” is a site- and context-specific performative installation, developed for Room 61 in the building for Art, Music, and Design in Bergen, and shown to the public in November 2022, March 2023, and November 2024.
The public presentation is a live experience for an audience, where they are invited to engage with the articulations of two panellists of expanded dimensions: 'The Art Academy in Bergen' and 'Store Lungegårdsvannet'.
This artistic result is the culmination of a series of developing workshops where human participants are invited to adopt the perspectives of larger, more-than-human beings by engaging in improvised speculative conversation and role-play embodiment. This occurs within an architecturally immersive and digitally interactive installation that unfolds around and within the participants. I, the artist-researcher, act as the moderator of the panel discussion.
The interactive environment responds to the performers as they talk and move, extending them beyond their human bodies, so that the entire room is experienced as the body of the articulating more-than-human panellists. This setup is intended to create the effect of decentralising the human subject and inviting the audience to feel as though they are seated within the larger networks as they speak and articulate.
During the panel discussion, the role-play conversation shifts between a more logical and coherent language and a more poetic, fragmented, and associative one. This shift occurs as the performers try to channel the feelings and experiences of the larger networks and express them. Conversation topics arise related to these expanded body-minds of the more-than-human, with porous and shifting boundaries, and how this affects their relationship to themselves and their environment. Subjects discussed therefore revolve around identity constructions, transformations, and change; about being both local and international, constructed and natural, dead and alive at the same time. Additionally, the environment surrounding the larger beings proliferates into other larger contextual beings, with whom they interact.
Materially and technically, the performing role-players talk in front of a Kinect sensor, which includes a range of inbuilt sensors that can map a person’s contours, movement, position, voice, and facial expressions. These inputs are processed through a programming language, VVVV, which generates sound output, and graphic/coloured video and light imaging, that are then outputted to various video projectors, LED lamps, and speakers in the room.
The space contains large hanging semi-transparent textiles—two-dimensional PLANES—that catch the video and light output while also allowing it to pass through to the walls in the SPACE. The projected visuals shift as the larger beings articulate and speak, creating imagery that transitions between dots, one-dimensional lines, wave patterns, and blue light. In addition, both the role-playing participants and the audience are connected with ropes, as connecting LINES loosely held or tied, mirroring the cables that connect the audiovisual equipment.
All this combined creates a layered and shifting interdimensional space—a performative stage for relational speculations that invites reflective engagement with the contexts of which we are part.
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
This artistic result arose out of the development of a performative installation, conducted through a series of test workshops between 2020 and 2024.
This sub-project continued to explore how simpler and more expansive interdimensional movements could manifest through the materials in the installation, the digital interactive setup, and the narrative. It was a continued exploration of folding the performative installation like a hypercube. However, the invitation for the audience to immerse themselves in folding dimensional perspectives now focused on how to embody and voice larger environments or contexts. Here, I was interested in how to extend the bodies of human performers to fill an entire room while simultaneously folding a larger environment or context into the mind of the performer. In this way, I examined how performative installations would become new materialist agents, or as I finally termed them “more-than-human beings.” Here, the objective of the project was to reflect in a more distributed and expanded way on our intricate relationship with our environment, which is both digital and physical, tangible and invisible.
To facilitate a shift from a more linear perspective to a distributed, interdimensional perspective, this project evolved from linear narrative speculation by a single performer to speculative group conversations.
For this development, I coined a working concept: a hypersubject, by which I meant a larger network or context, a more-than-human entity acting as a subject (with perspective, agency, and emotions). It could be a physical place (lake, park, mountain), an institution, a social or digital network, or a more abstract entity like the economy or the climate.
During development, I then invited performing participants to map a specific larger network to which they already had a relationship. By drawing on techniques from Live Action Role Play (LARP) [1] and theatre improvisation, I then invited them to speculatively and playfully embody these larger beings and talk together as if they were these speculative fabulations.
Eventually I found it important to situate the larger beings both site- and context-specific, to balance the actual and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstracted. I therefore chose two specific more-than-human beings: “The Art Academy in Bergen” and “Store Lungegårdsvannet,” and to show the work at the KMD building, so the audiences would literally sit inside the more-than-human bodies as they articulated. Drawing on Speculative Fabulation, I chose to ground the experience in the context of a conventional panel discussion, with academic informative language and a ritualised question/answer format, to balance the work's more speculative premise and give actuality to the utterances of the more-than-human beings.
In parallel to the speculative conversations, I explored how digital interactivity and augmentation could give the installations a performative expression in real-time and how computational movements could stretch the installations beyond normative limits of temporality, layering, malleability, and spatiality. As such, the development of digital interactive augmentation could remain a form of digital SPECULATION FABULATION or an investigation into how to possibly fold into HYPERSPACE.
Hence, I developed a customised sensor/programming/video/light/sound setup, together with creative technologist Luca Biada. Here, focusing on making visual outputs that represented a body as well as a space. Additionally, aiming to balance the real-time relationship between the effects of the talking/moving human and the generative movements and growth patterns of the programming language in VVVV, so that it felt like the room was the one articulating.
The digital graphics and lights were developed to reflect INTERDIMENSIONAL movement and balance between being illustrative and abstract. When dots were projected, it became dark, and the spatial effect for the audience was one of floating more freely in an installation without architectural boundaries. When projected LINES arrived, various overlapping one-dimensional directions were introduced, and the installation seemed more defined. The added light also made the SPATIAL more tangible. When the “waves” effect faded in, the two-dimensional projection screens and walls became fully visible as delimiting and overlapping PLANES. Overall, this setup gave the audience the possibility to move between shifting dimensional experiences during the performance.
The material installation was meant to hold a neutral model-like aesthetic that could be augmented and animated by the digital technology and speculative conversation. The initial neutrality was shown in the choice of white polyester voile fabric as PLANES installed to emulate a broken-up cube. Black rope and cables were featured as visible and tactile connectors of humans and machines. As such, they worked as a material reflection on the one-dimensional line, as well as on cybernetic circuits and networks, which are central to the research.
Overall, the installation had a distributed, immersive layout that disrupted the linear perspective, with no optimal point from which to experience the work. The performing humans could be sensed but were not centre stage, allowing the whole installation to be the main performer.
The digitally augmented nature of the spaces, as well as the speculative nature of text-based expressions within the spaces, had the effect of folding the perspectival positions into each other in the experience: the virtual and the material, the internal and external, the distant and the immersive. Thus, the work balanced between the actual and the imaginary in a way that I hoped would stimulate reflection in the participants and audience.
CONTRIBUTIONS
- Luca Biada: Development of Kinect/VVVV interactive design.
- Sofie Hviid Vinther: Production assistant.
- Marlene Rysstad, Beate Poikane, Emma Sjövall, Nicola Gunn, Marit Loe Bjørnstad: Performers in public panel discussions.
- Stine Kvam, Lars Kynde, Peter Voss Knude, Emma Sjövall, Beate Poikane, Erla Auddunsdottir, Linn Mina Paasche, Marlene Rysstad, Ingeborg Jørgensen Tysse, Yasemin Orhan, Yimin Dong, Sepideh Garakani: Participants in developing workshops.
- Siavash Kheirkhah: Documentation.
Store Lungegårdsvannet is a bay located in the Fløen and Møllendahl area of Bergen. Most people in the city see it as a lake, and it is addressed as such in the panel discussion.
For a detailed description of development see the reflection page.
Credits: All material, technical and documentation work of the PhD has been done together with Sidsel Christensen. Where no name is mentioned in credits, Sidsel has done the work or documentation.
[1] Live Action Role Play (LARP) evolved from tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, as well as from genre fiction. In LARP, players dress up as characters and act out scenarios in real life. These events can range from elaborate settings with built environments to "Chamber LARPs" or "black box LARPs," where the surroundings are suggested rather than physically depicted. LARP was independently invented in the late 1970s and early 1980s by various groups in North America, Europe, and Australia. Today, it is a large international community with its own festivals, conferences, and scholarly studies.
More information can be found at Nordic LARP, accessed 20.09.2024, https://nordiclarp.org.
VIDEO documentation: 50 min. full duration
The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension (2024)
Panelists: "The Art Academy" / Nicola Gunn and "Store Lungegårdsvannet" / Marit Loe Bjørnstad.
Moderator: "Sidsel Christensen"
VIDEO documentation: 2 min exctract.
The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension (2022)
Panelists: "The Art Academy" / Erla Auddunsdottir and "Store Lungegårdsvannet" / Beate Poikane.
Moderator: "Sidsel Christensen"