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Papers by Jonathan Reus

Conversation with Christoph Brunner, Alanna Thain, Nikki Forrest, Jonathan Reus, Flora Reznik and... more Conversation with Christoph Brunner, Alanna Thain, Nikki Forrest, Jonathan Reus, Flora Reznik and Sissel Marie Tonn.
The Reading Room #17 and #18 took place on the 2nd and 16th of June with guest readers Christoph Brunner and Alanna Thain, and was the continuation of our collaboration between The Reading Room and ‘ArchipelagoLab for Transversal Practices’ at Leuphana University.

This cluster of the Reading Room zooms in on the concept of anarchival practices. Traditionally, archiving has been seen as a practice of documenting and conserving, often done by institutions and those in positions of power. But counter-movements and efforts to archive the daily practices left out of official archives, or artist archives, are gaining momentum and challenging the limits of traditional approaches. The concept of anarchiving especially attempts to reproach archival methods that often erase the processual, affective, and contextual aspects of lived experience. Anarchival methods are active and lived, they are ways to carry forward the foundations of further action, catalysts for the next event. In this cluster of Reading Rooms we ask how can anarchiving be developed as a creative approach for both artists, activists and academics to use? These questions were unraveled through texts and works in the diverse fields of dance, film, queer and feminist movements as specific memories of daily life.
Furthermore we had the opportunity to collaborate with Nikki Forrest, a Montreal-based video artist around the video screening ‘The Feeling of Falling – Queer Ecologies, Uncertain Spaces”, a one-hour experimental video program of works from the independent artist run centers Groupe Intervention Video and Videographe based in Montreal. The program explored intersections of movement practice, audiovisual media and environmental relations. The works are connected by a playful focus on Queer Ecologies, drawing out on alternative and marginal histories of media form and practice, including the critical importance of intersectional identities, sustainable support, DIY and micro-budget production and other material practices. This screening took place on the 2nd of June before the first Reading Room session in this cluster.

In this Relay Conversation we will be discussing the reading of José Esteban Muñoz’ iconic essay ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’ and Alanna Thain’s piece ‘Anarchival Cinemas’ in the first session, and chapter 4 from André Lepecki’s book Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, in the second session.

In José Esteban Muñoz’ text “Ephemera as Evidence” we learn that ephemera in queer acts (of performance, political acts and archiving) is a modality of ‘anti-rigor’ and ‘anti-evidence’. Muñoz lays out his arguments in describing a performative piece by Tony Just, in which he scrubbed, sanitized and documented a run-down public men’s room, a ‘tea room where public sex flourishes’: “The result is a photograph that indexes not only the haunted space and spectral bodies of those anonymous sex acts, and Just’s performance after them, but also his act of documentation”, Muñoz writes. To the author the ephemeral constitutes ‘traces, glimmers, residues and specks of things’ – all distinctly material but not necessarily solid evidence (in the dominant perception of the word). Since ‘visible evidence’ may leave the queer subject vulnerable for attack, queerness has not been able to exist as ‘visible evidence’, which has often been undermined in official academic structures. “Evidence’s limit becomes clearly visible when we attempt to describe and imagine contemporary identities that do not fit into a single pre-established archive of evidence”. Thus the ephemerality of queer performances reformulates our conceptions of materiality, as well as proposes a way to resist dominant systems of aesthetic and institutional classification.

In her piece “Anarchival Cinemas” Alanna Thain discusses the emergence of digital technologies (such as portable devices and the digital video format), and their effects on the corporeal experience of cinema. She asks: “What happens when we re-imagine the event of cinema as no longer characterized by a spatially discrete and immersive place, but in terms of the relationality of bodies moving in spacetime?” Following a series of artistic examples that use different “immersive” digital technologies, she traces the potentials of cross-modal sensory perceptions made present in the in these works, as an effect of these technologies.

The Reading Room #17 and #18 took place on the 2nd and 16th of June with guest readers Christoph ... more The Reading Room #17 and #18 took place on the 2nd and 16th of June with guest readers Christoph Brunner and Alanna Thain, and was the continuation of our collaboration between The Reading Room and ‘ArchipelagoLab for Transversal Practices’ at Leuphana University. In the first session of the cluster that revolves around Anarchival Practices we discussed the texts “Ephemera as evidence” by José Esteban Muñoz and “Anarchival Cinemas” by Alanna Thain (you can read part 1 of this Relay Conversation at http://instrumentinventors.org/research/relay-conversation-reading-room-17-anarchival-practices-part-1/). In the second session of the same cluster, we continued to discuss those texts in depth, as well as adding André Lepecki’s chapters “The body as archive. Will to reenact and the afterlives of dances” and “Choreographic angelology. The dancer as worker of history (or, remembering is a hard thing)” from his book Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. In these texts the author address the “always-ambivalent relation dance has had with history, with dance’s own passing away” focusing on reenactments of performance and choreography. Lepecki’s work invites us to deal with the a certain afterlife, or a strategy of survival in specific cases of recent reenactments in the field of dance. In these performances, the body becomes an lived archive and immerses the audience into what he calls, following Didi Huberman (who, in turn, draws on Walter Benjamin’s notion of time), a “complex temporality”. Lepecki relates this to Munoz’ queer temporality, as these acts function within “horizons of extemporal futurities” as local strategies of critical engagement: they are a “political-performative force”. Taking Foucault’s notion of dispositif, a choreography becomes a way of “distributing the visible and the invisible”. Overall, he claims the value of a utterly humble gesture: to use one’s body as an archive for as long as one survives, counting on an ecology of existence that involves the audience and potential iterations of the work, to carry on with the task of translating.

This paper briefly summarizes a framework for optimizing real-time responsive musical agents to t... more This paper briefly summarizes a framework for optimizing real-time responsive musical agents to the playing preferences of an individual improvising musician. This optimization is achieved by employing an interactive evolutionary algorithm in which the tness of an agents behavior is evaluated by a performer in the creative moment, through the use of an unobtrusive physical interface.