Matter Dialogues

Otso Tapio Aavanranta

This exposition relates Claude-Lévi Strauss' concept of bricolage with two examples of the author's artistic praxis, with the aim that the subjective case studies will contribute to highlight a more general methodological standpoint of contemporary artistic creation, namely: the artistic work as a dialogical, enactive process where the discussion with the artistic material takes a guiding role. The proposal intends to resituate a classic concept from structuralist anthropology, which I find strikingly useful for analysing contemporary intermedia artistic processes and works. The exposition discusses the philosophical implications of a practice that abandons itself to an unforeseen, dialogical relationship with the environment. The oeuvre then becomes an ecological process of using what is offered by the situation, in a constant discussion with the environment. Ideas, forms and materials are engendered, lost and transformed in a dynamic process that resembles a sort of artistic aikido. The ecological strand of the discussion on bricolage leads to Anna Tsing's "Mushroom at the End of the World" and Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology”, where the concept of Nature and the value of naturalness are abolished in favour of a flat relationship between human and her environment: an ecological system between different manifestations of being, where human-made phenomena are not regarded as extra-natural. An artistic practice of bricolage finds a favourable breeding-ground in such a conceptual context.

References

References

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Discussion

Literature:

Derrida , Jacques "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978/2001.

accessed online at: http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html

Hoetzlein, Rama. Digital Bricolage. In The Organization of Human Knowledge: Systems for Interdisciplinary Research. Masters Thesis. University of California Santa Barbara, 2007.

Johnson, Christopher, Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept,

Paragraph, Vol. 35, No. 3 (November 2012), pp. 355-372.

Latour, Bruno. We have never been modern. Harvard university press, 2012.

Leskinen, Jaakko, Michel Callon ja sosiologian materialisointi, Näkökulmia teknologiaan, Edited by Tarmo Lemola, Gaudeamus, 2000.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The savage mind. University of Chicago Press, 1966, (French original 1962).

Mauss, Marcel. A general theory of magic. Psychology Press, 2001. (French original 1902).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L'oeil et l'esprit, Éditions Gallimard, 1964.

Morton, Timothy. Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2016.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT press, 2017, (original 1991).

Artworks:

Cage, John. Music of Changes, work for solo piano, 1951.

Lachenmann, Helmut. Pression, für einen Cellisten, composition, 1969.

Leitner, Bernhard. Series of "Ton" works, starting in 1971. https://www.bernhardleitner.at/works

Monahan, Gordon. Speaker swinging, loudspeaker performance, 1982.

Note on Tim Ingold:

This exposition's review process brought up Tim Ingold as a pertinent reference, pointing to his work on knowledge creation through making, within the methodological framework of cultural anthropology. I have taken notice of Ingold's pertinence in regard to the discussion on bricolage. However, my knowledge of his work formed only at a late stage of this exposition's creation, and the body of work proved to be too large and too important to be incorporated into the exposition. Ingold's work is of fundamental value and I would not like to add it as a light reference – rather study it in detail and incorporate it in future discussions.

Acknowledgements:

The author would like to thank Nathan Thomson (Tapage Nocturne), Satu Tuomisto and Juhana Nyrhinen (Motet) for their crucial collaboration.

Tapage Nocturne was produced as part of Otso Lähdeoja's "Structure-borne sound in music and intermedia creation" Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellowship at the Sibelius Aademy, Helsinki.

Motet was produced as part of Otso Lähdeoja's "Active Acoustics" Academy of Finland key project, and was supported by Tampere Biennale 2008 and the Centre for Artistic Research of the Uniarts Helsinki

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