Audiovisual Installation as Ecological Performativity (original) (raw)

Abstract of: Audiovisual Installation as Ecological Performativity

Leonardo

Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is a database of thesis abstracts (PhD, Master's and MFA) on topics at the intersections of art, science and technology. This Englishlanguage database was established at Pomona College (Claremont, CA). In addition to being published in the database, a selection of abstracts chosen by a peer review panel for their special relevance will be published annually in Leonardo journal and on the Leonardo website. Authors of abstracts most highly ranked by the peer review panel are invited to submit an article for publication consideration in Leonardo.

Bringing Forth a World: Sound and Audiovisual Installation as a Process of Cognition

2014

The motivation behind this paper stems from my practice as a composer and my research as a PhD candidate at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The majority of artefacts that result from this research are collaborative works of sound and audiovisual installations which explore new relationships from an ecological perspective. In this context, the term ecological refers to the philosophical school of thought that believes the world to be a network of interconnected and interdependent phenomena. The work initiated by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Santiago Theory of Cognition has been a primary source in contextualizing my practice. In addition, Andrew Pickering’s notion of the dance of agency, and Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject further this discussion. This paper presents these theories in the context of a creative practice that aims to engage with ontological considerations of interconnectedness. It investigates the interrelationships between living and ...

The Aesthetics of Causality: A Descriptive Account into Ecological Performativity

In this paper, I offer a perspective into a creative research practice I have come to term as Ecological Performativity. This practice has evolved from a number of non-linear audio- visual installations that are intrinsically linked to geographical and everyday phenomena. The project is situated in ecological discourse that seeks to explore conditions and methods of co-creative processes derived from an intensive data-gathering procedure and immersion within the respective environments. Through research the techniques explored include computer vision, data sonification, live convolution and improvisation as a means to engage the agency of material and thus construct non-linear audiovisual installations. To contextualize this research, I have recently reoriented my practice within recent critical, theoretical, and philosophical discourses emerging in the humanities, sciences and social sciences generally referred to as ‘the nonhuman turn’. These trends currently provide a reassessment of the assumptions that have defined our under- standing of the geo-conjunctures that make up life on earth and, as such, challenge the long-standing narrative of human exceptionalism. It is out of this reorientation that the practice of Ecological Performativity has evolved.

Listening and Mediation: of agency and performative responsivity in ecological sound art practices

In Kozel's rethinking of agency, and her critique of the so-called smoothness of interactivity, she points to the messiness of the act and how "agency might be spread across a range of human modalities, distributed across bodies and across materialities" (Kozel, 2007, pp. 186-187). Her argument draws on Margaret Morse's critique of interactivity in The Poetics of Interactivity (2003) i.e., that the once useful term has gone on to mean too many things. Interactivity "is expressed not only in art but ubiquitously in every sphere of contemporary life where chips reside, from automatic tellers and garage-door openers to computers that access discs, CD-ROMs, and the World Wide Web" (Morse, 2003, p. 17). As an alternative, Morse proposes the concept of responsiveness, which eventually is taken further through Kozel's concept of performative responsivity.

Let's (be) play(ed by) an ocean: of situated actions within ecological sound art

Stefánsdóttir, H. S. (2020) Let’s (be) Play(ed by) an Ocean: Of Situated Actions Within Ecological Sound Art. In: G. D. Hansson, G. and A. Hultqvist (eds.), ‘Compositional’ Becoming, Complexity and Critique. Art Monitor. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg Press, 2020

This chapter investigates participatory sense-making within ecological sound art. The field links to “a broader set of cultural practices in which the imperial power of ‘the human’ over the rest of the world is shifting in favor of what we might call a more eco-systemic engagement” (Hogg, 2013). In summer 2018, the project sent poet Gunnar D. Hansson, composer Anders Hultqvist and ecological sound artists Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir and Stefan Östersjö on a search for the sounds of the book Tapeshavet (Hansson, 2017), through the artistic method of activation. This chapter analyses the processes of such participatory sense-making, which springs out of an ecological-enactive approach. Based on this the author puts forth and argues for the concept of multi-entity performance (Rawlings, personal communication, May, 2019; Stefánsdóttir, 2019a) as a technique as well as analytical and conceptual stance, thus showing through doing that the ecological-enactive approach has the power of “providing one with new tools and technology and new understandings of processes, in any musical environment and its collaborative creativity, where things happen in the connection” (Stefánsdóttir, 2019b).

Dissolving Dualities: onto-epistemological implications of ecological sound art

Contemporary Music Review, 2015

This paper discusses the arts practice that emerged during the AHRC funded research project ‘Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments’ (2012-2014). The introduction covers the project’s eco-critical basis, practical methodologies developed during it (including the roles of experimentation and improvisation), and the particular epistemological value of practice-led research in this context. A broader theoretical discussion then outlines how non-representational theory and Tim Ingold’s concept of dwelling help to expand and clarify the argument for participative environmental arts practice. These ideas are then developed through a series of examples and a conceptual approach based on notions of working with, of, and for the environment. It concludes by considering the multifaceted ontological significance of experiences of ecological arts practice, directly, as an in situ performer on the one hand, and with subsequent artefacts, performances and installations removed from the original site, on the other. Keywords: Landscape Quartet; environmental art; sound art; non-representational theory; practice-led research. If you are unable to access this through a library there are a limted number of free downloads here (feel free to use if you are in need): http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/xrBGPFxAtssj9TbiGSYj/full

A Performative Investigation of the Agency of Sound: Mapping the Sound/ Soundscape Portrait

ADSJ Australasia Drama Studies Journal, Issue 79, 2021

In this article, I discuss Mapping the Sound/Soundscape Portrait (206, 2018), an audience-participatory, synaesthetic sound/drawing live performance. I perform my synaesthesia: sitting on a large piece of paper, I draw the sounds that I hear as I “see” them with the eyes of my mind, and I move accordingly— if sound is a place (soundscape), what does it look like? Conceiving sound as a performative element with agency, Mapping invites those involved to pay attention to the liveness of the soundscape in which they are immersed and their relationship with it. This work questions the sight-hegemonic and purpose-oriented human experience of place by centralising the presence and presentness of sound as the key-element of narrative-making and knowledge production. The agency of the audience and of sound in the performance de-centralises the artist, who ceases to be the protagonist of the work and becomes a vehicle for its process to unfold. The performance offers a new sensorial perspective on the surrounding environment to those involved, contributing to the scholarship studying the role of live art and embodied practices as tools in investigating the world.

Participation and creation: towards an ecological understanding of musical creativity

La Deleuziana , 2019

This paper draws on artistic explorations of territorial and spatial forces through analysis of projects set in the natural landscape, in a specific indoor site or at the threshold between the two. Specific attention is given to the artistic processes at play in the transformation of materials cre-ated/collected in the natural environment when shaped for presentation in an indoor location. What is the relation between being and becoming in this liminal space? According to Erwin Straus, the impetus to this process is the pathic moment of sensation, a moment which evolves in two dimensions: as an unfolding of the world and of the self (Straus 1965). Louis Schreel argues that in Deleuze and Guattari, artistic practice activates a process in which «the work 'captures' forces at work in the world and renders these sensible. Its effects are above all real and not merely imaginary: the image is not a mental given but a concrete, existing reality» (Schreel 2014: 100). Here, Deleuze distinguishes between the percept-landscape in the absence of man-and affect, the non-human becomings contained in the artwork. This paper wishes to unpack these processes through a study of two concrete instances of artistic practice, aiming to create immediate interaction between musician and environment, in which either of the two authors took part.

The performance ‘apparatus’: performance and its documentation as ecological practice

Green Letters, 2016

The performance score for Water Carry, printed above, refers to the first in an evolving suite of performances and events collectively titled Guddling About: Experiments in vital materialism with particular regard to water. The performances were instigated by me and my regular (human) collaborator, Nick Millar, initially with rivers in Canada and subsequently with various watercourses in Scotland and Spain. 1 Guddling About is an ongoing project where performance and performance documentation are used to explore human-water interdependencies (and by extension human-environment interdependencies) in specific material and cultural contexts. In this essay, I reflect on the potential of Guddling About as an ecological practice. In using the term 'ecological practice' I wish to distinguish our work from ecoactivist practices whose aim is to address directly issues such as human-induced climate change or to advocate for and enact 'greener' ways of living. Rather, I use 'ecological' in an expanded sense influenced by Deleuze/Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Jane Bennett and others working in the field of human-environment interrelations. My definition of ecological entails an aspiration for a way of being in/with the universe that dissolves nature/culture and human/nonhuman binaries, but which acknowledges differences, antagonisms and contradictions, rather than seeking resolution or transcendence. Guddling About attempts to tangle with the messiness and paradoxes of living 'ecologically' (for instance, the inherent paradox of flying from Scotland to Canada to undertake an artists' residency in 'ecological practice'). It attempts to confront and negotiate the problematics of 'being human' in a more-thanhuman universe. The value of our practice as 'ecological' resides, I suggest, in the complex and shifting relationships that continually unfold among the performances and their documentationdocumentation which manifests as written scores and descriptions, sets of instructions, photographs, sound recordings, watermarks, and more. I reflect on