Confronting Realities. Working on Cinematic Autosociobiographies (PEEK-Projekt)
In relation to many recent literary works that move around the format of literary autosociobiography Confronting Realities asks from an art practical and theoretical point of view how the format of cinematic autosociobiographies can be explored, described and produced, especially focusing on the fundamentally collaborative character of filmmaking. The project is designed on four levels: Level (1) of Autosociobiographical Exploration that will create the “Laboratory of cinematic autosociobiographies” (LAFA). LAFA tries to probe, explore and search, to make accessible and to contextualize one’s biography from an art-based perspective. Level (2) of Cinematic Forms and Techniques intends to develop and create narratives and cinematic techniques of cinematic (auto)sociobiographies and translating them into cinematic formats. Level (3) of Interdisciplinary and Theoretical Contextualization wishes to build a strong foundation and interconnection between art- based and interdisciplinary research about sociobiographies, cinematic forms and collaborative strategies of art production. Level (4) of Reflection and Evaluation intends to build a reflective framework around the project. During all these stages the “Digital Archive of Cinematic Autosociobiographies” (DAFA), a website-based representation and documentation platform, will ensure an ongoing dissemination and documentation of the project. So far, the field of cinematic autosociobiographies has not been explored neither theoretically nor practically, though several related cinematic formats exist. Confronting Realities therefore promises a pioneer work in this field. Furthermore, in times of a worldwide shift to the right marked by a rise in nationalism and populism, the question of social classes and its cultural, economic and political changes as well as their inscriptions into the individual have once again become topical.
Primary staff involved in the project
The Institute for Film and Television – Film Academy Vienna / mdw –University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna will host the project. The main contributors are Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl (professor for media and film studies, project leader), Nina Kusturica (filmmaker, theatre director) Christina Wintersteiger (curator and media and film studies), Elena Meilicke (senior media and film studies scholar), and Barbara Wolfram (theatre & film artist and media and film studies & psychology scholar)
Atlas of Smooth Spaces (PEEK-Projekt)
- Theoretical framework
In this artistic research project we explore how to notate, communicate and compose space phenomena across audio-corporeal artistic practices. We investigate these in four disciplines: Dance, Rhythmics, Choir Conducting and Direct Sound. They share an awareness for a certain tacit knowledge about space. In stark contrast to musical or movement notations, one finds that notated spaces are rather scarce in the audio-corporeal practices even though space unites them. We argue that this lacuna will be brigded by working on an atlas of space qualities. Rather than communicating merely the metric measures of spaces without the performer, we are concerned instead with emergent spatial qualities of smooth spaces that complement the performer, that exist outside of but not without the performer.
- Hypotheses / Research questions / Objectives
We will compare and contrast each of the four disciplines with one another to investigate how to intensify spatial phenomena, how to translate and communicate them, how to appropriate them for ones own practice and how to engage into mutual composition. We inquire about the kinetic spheres of two performers when a third one enters. Similar to the three-body problem in physics we seek to describe this emergent phenomena. How can the complexified spatial interactions of the kinespheres be notated? How saturated becomes the space, how fragmented, how synchronous?
- Approach /Methods
We conduct experiments during which a smooth space phenomenon is first distilled and condensed to a clear spatial expression. This we call the null-space. It is the starting point for our investigations and experiments, which are co-created in an iterative process by the performers and a complexity scientist. We foresee a recursive pipeline, that divides the work into individual, collision and co-production modes. We also foresee a role fluidity – performer, experimenter and documenter are not attached to individuals allowing for a change of perspective.
- Level of innovation
Acknowledging the importance of spaces in the audio-corporeal arts we consider the development of transdisciplinary space practices and notations as our major innovation. Secondly we believe that the particular mode of collaboration between performers and a complexity scientist leads into new artistic methodologies. Thirdly we create a toolbox that refers to the intense qualities of audio-corporeal space articulations and enlargens the disciplinary range of compositional space factors for artistic productivity.
- Primary staff involved in the project
University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw)
Institute of Dance Arts / Anton Bruckner Private University Linz
Complexity Science HUB Vienna
Alphabetically: Rose Breuss (Dance), William Franck (Direct Sound), Johannes Hiemetsberger (Choir),
Hanne Pilgrim (Rhythmics).
Creative (Mis)Understandings (PEEK project)
Rotting Sounds - Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio (PEEK-Projekt)
Most of today’s media output, be it audio or video, is produced and stored in the digital domain. Although digital data are adorned by the myth of lossless transmission and migration, everyday experience does prove the existence of degradation and, ultimately, data loss in various forms. This pertains to the physical nature of storage media and playback devices as well as to media formats and software in the context of their technological infrastructure. The project strives to elaborate on the causes, mechanisms and effects of such deterioration, specifically in the context of digital audio.
Since degradation cannot be avoided on principle, it is our general aim to unearth latent degrees of freedom pertaining to the artistic practice in the omnipresence of decay.
How can degradation effects be understood, actuated, reproduced, directed and harnessed within sound art? Which are the mechanisms and implications of obsolescence concerning hard- and software? How can we model the process of decay in the digital domain, and what are its products and residues? What is the impact of the environment and human interaction? To which extent are artworks products of their material sources or their symptoms of decay?
Social D(ist)ancing – AR Pilot Project
project blog: https://sociald-ist-ancing.blogspot.com/p/pilot.html
RAD Performance – AR Pilot Project
RAD Performance places concerts and sound art on bicycles, in motion and with a multitude of loudspeakers at the centre of artistic research. Under the artistic guidance of Conny Zenk, the project started in July 2020 as an Artistic Research Pilot at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Based on historical drawings and approaches to participatory, bicycle-related forms of play (Reigenfahren u. Radfahr-Spiele by Josef Adametz, Vienna: Kreisel u. Gröger, 1901), the artistic team (Petra Sturm, Veronika Mayer, Rahel Kraft and Conny Zenk) is developing a choreography for cyclists, as well as graphic notations for musicians as the basis for 6-channel compositions. RAD performers will perform in public spaces using mobile loudspeakers on their bicycles. The acoustic, urban space complements, overlays and expands the electronic composition. At the crossroads of concert, performance and sound art, the bicycle becomes an artistic medium.
Mobile Stage – AR Pilot Project
Concept
The interdisciplinary project with the working title “‘Mobile Stage'” combines different components and aspects of classical theatre, such as stage design, performance, sound, and the relationship between viewers and performers. It is a rotating stage that serves both as a performance space and as a sound installation and has been designed that it can be used for various external projects. The work is based on the idea of an inclusive public space and performance as an integral part of everyday public life and sees this as a prerequisite. The inclusion of the environment in this stage body is a central point in the individual disciplines. It has an influence on performance, sound and stage design. So we wanted to make the public space our space of action. Building on the stage body, we become part of the place, transforming and expanding the action space into a stage moment.
Design
In the design, the centre of movement forms a metal tube around which a stage surface moves and rotates the surface moves both on its own axis and up and down in a helical motion. This creates different height ratios and spaces in between.
Independency
Through the institutional independence of the performance space, the project stands for an open space of experience and deliberately opposes the categorised ascribed social classes of the viewing audience. The round shape is supposed to dissolute the classical frontal perception so each viewing side is equal.
Stage design
The rotating stage was designed to be able to change between scenes as quickly as possible. One starting point was the inclusion of the revolving stage as a basic element of movement to which the performers are exposed. Questions of proprioception in relation to moving surfaces come up. How does the body react, how do movements change?
Performative
New choreographies are tested by means of the stage project. The rotating movement of the platform simulates the dancers’ proprioception and dissolves their basic motor skills. New possibilities in movement material and self-perception are developed.
Proprioception – The 6th sense
Proprioception is the perception of the position of one’s own body in space, including the sensation of weight, tension, strength and speed. It is no organ of its own and operates invisibly deep inside the body. Its a product of all the nerve stimuli that our brain constantly receives, especially from muscles and tendons. Proprioception is also about internal sensations that are difficult to recreate. The 6th sense arises from the interaction between our body and our environment, it accompanies us consciously and unconsciously. At a time when our body is being used less and less and is being paralysed due to increasingly sedentary activities, it is good to listen to our proprioception – both in our self-perception and in our interaction with our fellow human beings and our environment.
Synthesis
The Mobile Stage is meant to go to different places to enable different reflections and happenings with its environment. The synthesis between the stage element/sound sculpture/installation and its environment/surroundings/environment as a central research topic on all levels. It is about the relationship between human and environment, as well as between sculpture and environment. (References to Anish Kappor or Dan Grahams’ Octagon for Münster)
Sound
The inclusion of the environment in the object is also an essential point in sound design. The “sonic environment” described by Murray Schaeffer serves as a central concept in dealing with sound. In
the stage, this would be the soundscape, by which the stage is surrounded by. For the development of the piece itself, a soundtrack is planned that will mixed with the “sonic environment”. Modulating effects could be Informations won out of the movement from the stage or the performer. Here we would like to experiment and research. How can movement change sound?
Book – Knowing in Performing
Knowing in Performing. Artistic Research in Music and the Performing Arts
This anthology takes stock of current developments in and reflections on artistic research in music and the performing arts. Thirteen international contributions explore the possibilities of processual knowledge production, taking into account participatory and experimental approaches, and examine their institutional implementation. How can performing be transformed into cognition? What does it mean to think through music, theatre, or dance?
The anthology published by Annegret Huber, Doris Ingrisch, Therese Kaufmann, Johannes Kretz, Gesine Schröder and Tasos Zembylas with transcript is based on contributions to the symposium “Knowing in Performing” in April 2018 as well as to the eponymous lecture series that took place at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna from 2018 to 2020. As part of the book presentation, the dancer, choreographer and artistic researcher Evfa Lilja has read excerpts from her opening statement on the state of artistic research.
Lecture by Efva Lilja at the book presentation of “Knowing in Performing” DOI: 10.21939/KIP-2021-LILJA
Cover image: Angelicá Castelló – magnetic room
AR Pilot Call – support for artistic research
In 2018 the mdw began offering internal financial support for pilot projects in the field of artistic research.
The objective of this call was to facilitate the further development of artistic research practices, methods, and discourses within the fields and disciplines represented at the mdw. Nine artistic research projects, most of which are transdisciplinary and collaborative in nature, have since been granted support, and several of their teams have already submitted third-party funding applications to the Programme for Arts-Based Research (PEEK) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The nine internally funded projects were selected from over 20 submissions by virtue of their innovative research questions and commensurately portrayed methods, with the idea being that artistic practice should play a central role in the research process. A further objective of this pilot call, above and beyond facilitating eventual third-party funding applications, was to disseminate projects’ findings via public performances, exhibitions, and publications. One avenue of publication is the website “Research Catalogue”—an online database that collects, archives, publishes, and exhibits artistic research—run by the Society of Artistic Research (SAR), of which the mdw is a member. The University’s present objective is to further intensify and refine its activities in the field of artistic research, a field that is now developing in so many respects, via the lecture series Knowing in Performing, the ongoing PEEK projects Rotting Sounds and Creative (Mis)understandings, and preparatory work for the future doctoral programme.
Further informations at the Webpage of Research Support at mdw
Think Tank – about the foundations of artistic research
In 2018 in three meetings at mdw with experts from mdw and from outside perspectives of artistic research were discussed, their foundation, contexts, possible or impossible definitions.
Think Tank Artistic Research (documentation, in german)
