Zentrum Fokus Forschung
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Rustenschacherallee 2-4, 1020 Wien, Austria
Taking place in Vienna (3 – 6 October 2023), Convocation II is a gathering of expanded language-based artistic research, focused on the sharing of “practices.” Convocation — from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call’. We call for a live “coming together” of artistic researchers whose practices engage with the materiality and mediality of language: from the wordless corporeality of body language to the virtuality of digital text, from the voicing of spoken utterance to the textility of words on a page. Convocation II is conceived as a reciprocal space for creating interconnections with a wider international community of artistic researchers working with language. The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.
The focus of Convocation II is on language-based artistic research “practices”.
We ask: How can we share research “practices”? What new formats and models might be required? What happens as different practices are brought into relation, into dialogue, into proximity? How might we practise together?
Contributions to Convocation II take the form of:
Practice Sharings or Glimpses
Practice Sharing (Duration: 10 – 90 minutes)
The Practice Sharing format focuses on an experiential encounter with the live unfolding of a practice — this mode of engagement could be participatory, performative, exploratory, speculative. How can you share your “practice”? How might others engage with/in/through your specific “practice” — what ways of dwelling in or inhabiting; activating or enacting; doing or not-doing a practice together might be opened or shared? We invite diverse forms of sharing – which could include “doing things together”, walks, collective activities or exercises, performances, actions, workshop formats (and other possibilities ……)
Glimpses (Duration: 10 mins)
The Glimpses format is conceived as short presentations to give a ‘flavour’ or offer a glimpse into a practice.
Location
The Zentrum Fokus Forschung is a unit at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in which independent artistic research is generated and connected. The building itself comprises various indoor research spaces, surrounded by a walled garden. It is located on the edge of the Prater, a large public park in Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Proposals were invited that take advantage of this distinctive location — whether inside the building or outside in the gardens, as well as further afield within the Prater or neighbouring district.
Convocation II is hosted by the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research (co-founded by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin). It builds upon and extends conversations from Convocation I which took place within the frame of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Convocation II will create a live and in-person context for further ‘sharing practices’ of language-based artistic research, following publication of two online Practice Sharing presentations in 2020 and 2023.
CONVOCATION II is not a public event, rather it is conceived as an intimate gathering of language-based artistic research involving the sharing of practice between around 65 individuals. Rather than a public conference or symposium as such, CONVOCATION II has been planned with a more personal format, allowing for exchange and conversation between contributors, especially through a process of ‘practice sharing’.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
15.30 - 17.00
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Kai Ziegner | How to Voice the Unspeakable
LOCATION: INDOORS I // DURATION: 90 MINUTES
A Lecture Performance: Kai Ziegner's project "Franz, the War and the Oranges of Fort Ord" follows in the footsteps of his grandparents Franz and Marianne. Coming from a small Saxon village, they were initially staunch Nazis. Franz travelled the world as a soldier and became a prisoner of war in California. Marianne looked after the family farm and the forced labourers who worked there. Ziegner will show artifacts, that he has collected and a selection of photographs he has taken and he will read his own speculative texts together with the participants.
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Benjamin Jenner| WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES
LOCATION: GARDEN // DURATION: 90 MINUTES
In this practice sharing Benjamin Jenner explores how, in the absence of vision, the body, language and landscape combine to form a particular type of cartographic, text-informed, mental image in the mind, that is both a record of movement and a score for future object intra-actions. For Convocation, Jenner will assist participants in navigating blindfold through the landscape of Zentrum Fokus Forschung (ZFF). The blurring of physical site and temporal event is deliberate here, the activity of navigating blindfolded with the body generatively blending with psychic travel in the mind. This is an opportunity for participants to think about how vision enables a particular version of the wor[l]d, and to speculate on what other kinds of wor[l]d might be possible in vision’s absence.
OPENING GATHERING
14.00 - 15.15
LOCATION: INDOORS I
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Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin | Convocation
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
A welcome and introduction from Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin (co-organisers of Convocation) and Alexander Damianisch, Head of Zentrum Fokus Forschung [the four co-founders of the Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research].
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Elena Peytchinska & Thomas Ballhausen | From New Ecology of the Book to Operative Fiction. An Exercise in Spatial Writing
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
In their exploration of the spatiality of language, Peytchinska & Ballhausen examine the multilayered experience of the book as an object as well as a geometrical, topological and especially performative space, which they understand as a turbulent ecology. Further elaborating this practice, the poetics of Operative Fiction is not only about the encounter with the supposedly unthinkable other but about its active and necessary integration into one’s process of thinking and creating. Peytchinska & Ballhausen understand their artistic research collaboration as a complex texture of literary, scientific, spatial, material and performative writing practices: an ecosystem of agencies and operations, theory and fiction.
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Lena Séraphin | Collective Writing in Public Space
LOCATION: MEET AT ZFF / DURATION: 90 MINUTES
The aim of this collective attempt at writing is to position ourselves in shared spaces and reciprocated texts, and to study how we respond to public space by notating what we observe not only with eyesight but with all bodily senses. This live-writing has a performative quality as the writers are being observed themselves. Since it is undoable to write down everything that happens in one’s surroundings, the writing becomes a series of choices. The workshop is about learning to be aware of these choices and questions if there is a possibility that the physical senses perceive in a categoric mode.
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Louise Adkins | Notes for a Performance – Revisioning a Smoky Meeting
DURATION: 10-MINS GLIMPSE
Louise Adkins will perform an extract from the performance script, Notes for a Performance – Revisioning a Smoky Meeting part of an ongoing research project titled Notes for a Performance. The performances and accompanying scripts have been informed by a series of artist residencies working with historical collections, heritage archives and sites across the UK. Working with audio description writing techniques the performances scripts present a disjunctive temporal reading of the historical sites and collections. The scripts articulate a cyclical narrative structure that assimilated past, present, and future tense incorporating repetitive voices that layer, loop, fold, and crack with every recitation. These performance scripts presented a synchronic voicing of historical documents that with each repetition evolved into a diachronic reading of the past.
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Gavin Keeney & OOI-MTA+++ | Ideational Franciscanism
DURATION: 30 MINUTES
This presentation will report on activities undertaken from 2021 to 2023 toward a “No Rights” status for collectivist-based works of literary-artistic merit. Works featured in the presentation are to be drawn from the perpetually curated OOI-MTA+++ archive. As forensic report leading to an elaboration of why the knowledge commons has become managed and exploited by Capital, all the while entirely dependent upon forms of “prior art” that suggests that Intellectual Property Rights law is a form of slavery, the ongoing research project seeks to “reconcile” ideational Franciscanism with or “wrest” ideational Franciscanism from the neo-scholastic hairsplitting of biopolitical, neo-Marxist argumentation.
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Gretel Acosta López/ Contemporary art to read. Literature in art context
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
Gretel Acosta López’s research examines two growing scenarios: narrative fiction works conceived as art in contemporary art context and works virtually creating contemporary art in fiction. She explores visual artists using literary forms for artistic creation (e.g. Fabio Kacero, Pablo Helguera, and Yornel Martínez) as well as writers incorporating contemporary art as setting and theme in their works (e.g. Juan Cárdenas, Héctor Manjarrez, and Margarita Mateo Palmer). Her research attempts to foster a deeper understanding of the artistic potential of these literary texts, alongside considering the potential impact of bridging gaps between contemporary art and narrative fiction.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
17.15 - 18.45
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Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond | Am Schüttel-A Mis/Guided Tour through the Neighbourhood
Location: Meet at ZFF // Duration: 90 minutes
The performative walk Am Schüttel by Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond will highlight certain historical, artistic, architectural and urban contexts of the backdrop of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, in which the gathering is located. The delving into the background of the neighbourhood will foreground topics and conversations that are both specific to its local situatedeness, as well as related to current practices of artistic and language-based research.
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Beverley Carruthers | Guttin’ Quines
DURATION: 10-MINUTE GLIMPSE
In this research project Beverley Carruthers investigates the story of the Guttin’ Quines, through oral histories of those with lived experience. Participants in the project have been invited to share and exchange stories of their lives: telling the story of the fisher girls from multiple perspectives of gutting fish, knitting and the songs they sang. Through these interviews it is clear that fishermen wore “ganseys” that identified them as being from a specific location. Carruthers uses these gansey knitting patterns as the basis for the score as she edited oral histories and field recordings to create contemporary versions of a Gaelic waulking song: * GP7 Great Yarmouth Old Charlie Grice’s Gansey; * GP24 Sheringham Belsha Johnson’s Gansey.
SOFT LANDING
Orientation / Exploration / Testing
11.00 - 13.30
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Self-organised: Prior to the official beginning of Convocation II, there is time available for contributors to arrive onsite and familiarise themselves with the location, specifically those contributors who are planning sessions in the garden. Groups or collaborations are also very welcome to meet onsite in advance of 14.00.
FOOD + DRINKS
18.45 - 19.30
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Sharing conversation + eating together : informal gathering at ZFF (Food + drink provided).
'Notes for a Performance - Revisioning a Smoky Meeting' - performance documentation. Jonathan Purcell (2018)
