PEEK-Projects

Shaken Gounds. Seismography of Precarious Presences

Shaken Grounds. Seismography of Precarious Presences is an artistic research project that explores the artist’s role as a seismograph in the intricate relationship between humanity and an evolving, technologically influenced geological environment. Throughout history, worship sites have been constructed where humans connect with the Earth’s interior—volcanoes, fissures, and caves—echoing a geological time beyond individual, human lifespans. Rituals enacted at these sites transform perceptions of time, cultivating a heightened responsibility towards the future.

The Oracle of Delphi stands as a renowned example, where mind-expanding gases emerged from rock seams to the surface and influenced predictions. Today, humans are extensively harnessing the Earth’s interior, altering surface stress distribution through i.a. mineral extraction, rising water levels, CO2storage or geothermal power generation, even triggering earthquakes. This interdependency underscores the inseparable link between humanity and the planet’s structure, revealed through shockwaves.

Across cultures and epochs, artists have been declared seismographs (Riedl, 2014), capable of sensing and articulating forthcoming dynamics or shocks. Although ideas about the role of artists have changed and art has long been deprived of its special status (Luhmann, 1995), transdisciplinary artistic research in alliance with the sciences is said to be able to produce innovative solutions for the future of an ecologically, politically and economically shaken world community. In this research project, a transdisciplinary team re-explores the role of artists as seismographs to train their perception at selected sites of seismic activity. Man-made earthquakes are a phenomenon that has only recently gained prominence, and few artists have addressed the issue. This research endeavor investigates this phenomenon through artistic research, aiming to foster a new socio-ecological consciousness. Our focus encompasses artistic-performative methodologies, anthropology, geology, and body awareness through somatic-therapeutic techniques, offering avenues for addressing the human-induced shockwaves of the Anthropocene.

Shaken Grounds. Seismography of Precarious Presences is hosted by the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna led by artists Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Peter Kozek, and Lucie Strecker, alongside international collaborators.

PROJECTPARTNERS

• BMEIA (together with Austrian Cultural Forum Rome and Künstlerhaus Vereinigung Vienna, AT)
• Bjarki Bragasson (Artist & Head of Fine Art Department at Iceland University of Arts, IS)
• Joseph Dodds (Psychoanalyst, Czech Psychoanalytical Society, CZ, and International Psychoanalytical Association)
• Oscar Fernandez Bellon (Structural Geologist, University of Vienna, Department of Geology)
• Sabine Folie (Art Historian, Curator, Wirter, Director of the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, AT)
• Helga Franza (Volcanic Attitude Festival, Milano/Naples, IT)
• Victor Jaschke (Filmmaker and Interactor, AT)
• VestAndPage (Verena Stenke, Artist and Andrea Pagnes, Artist and Writer, DE/IT)
• Nicola Fornoni,( Performance Artist, IT)
• MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, IT
• Sandro de Vita (Vulcanologist, National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and INGV – Osservatorio Vesuviano, Naples, IT)
• Werner Moebius (Sound Artist, AT)
• Nicolas Freytag (Painter, CH)

https://www.shaken-grounds.org

Dancing with the Nonhuman: An Aesthetics of Encounter

Institut für Bildende und Mediale Kunst – Abteilung Medientheorie

The robots are coming! The vision of our sociotechnical future with robot companions, co-workers and caretakers is fueled with machines that look like us.

The project ‘Dancing with the Nonhuman’ puts forward a counter proposition to this mechanical charade by embracing the machinic and its aesthetic potential. Bringing together experimental methods from creative robotics and choreography, feminist perspectives and concepts from embodied cognition, the project investigates performative ecologies of human-robot encounters. It develops an extended performance-making practice spanning choreographic experiments with human-nonhuman configurations; a Laban/Bartenieff inspired movement analysis/language for machinelike robots; and embodied machine learning. Movement and its potential for dynamic, generative, relation-making as a mode of research and knowledge production becomes the tool for re-imagining our relationships with robots without a humanlike veneer. This relational enactment of empathic, intra-bodily resonances begins with a choreographic score that provokes fluctuating morphologies, dispositions, and identities between a human performer and an abstract machine performer. Subject-object boundaries are broken down and, in their place, fluent forms of presence and agency emerge, and with-it social notions of the other, nonhuman.

Dancing with the Nonhuman is funded through the PEEK Programme, Austrian Science Fund (FWF), 2019-22, and part of the ongoing research programme Machine Movement Lab (MML), founded in 2015 by Petra Gemeinböck and Rob Saunders.

Project team:

• Petra Gemeinböck (project lead)
• Marie-Claude Poulin (choreography research)
• Rob Saunders (mechatronics/machine learning)
• Roos van Berkel (Laban/Bartenieff movement analysis)
• Rochelle Haley (staging research)

www.machinemovementlab.net

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2020.577900/full#B75

Contingent Agencies

Contingent Agencies is an artistic research project inquiring into a subject matter, which is central for artistic and performative practices and has been denominated with different terms: “atmosphere”, “mood”, “situation”, “place”, “environment” or “figure”.

All these expressions stand for a kind of presence, which is basically characterized as significant but non-objectified, precise and at the same moment vague, ephemeral and enveloping. It is a kind of presence that emerges on a level of body-mind encompassing the person to whom it appears due to the complex interaction between all components of the situation in which it arises. This project focuses on the research of one central aspect of this kind of presence that has been often overseen: the agency of the situation’s components that allow it to arise. We ask: What is the specific agency of the different elements that enable the emergence of ephemeral environments?

This inquiry takes a phenomenological and enactivist approach, which enables a fruitful combination of an experienced-based access to the object of research and a system-oriented perspective. The structure of the project is based on individual research cells: spatio-temporally defined units within which practices of notation individually or collectively are performed, which in turn serve as the basis for further practices of reflection.

Project Team:

• Nikolaus Gansterer  (principal investigator)
• Alex Arteaga (key researcher)

https://www.contingentagencies.net

Keywords: experimental notation, enactivist phenomenology, emergent environments, embodied knowledge

Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies

A variety of choreo-ethical, inter-subjective and transdisciplinary encounters explore the movements and interstices between the fields of Performance, Philosophy and Therapy. Scrutinizing and staging the relations and intersections between the three research areas lies its focus on practices of Being-In-Contact to investigate, reflect and synthesise the sharings and differences between them. The conceptual bearing of choreo-ethical assemblages as highly mobile assemblies bound to aesthetic-communicative situations gets probed in practice.

In the lab setting of a choreo-graphic environment, diffractive dialogue practices are tested with colleagues across the three research fields. The hypothesis is that such assemblages arise in art, philosophy and therapeutic settings alike and the proposition is to explore how choreo-ethics – a newly coined term – have the capacity to activate processes, that form the fabric of social aesthetics through performative tools. Techniques of getting in touch, nurturing attention, thinking – through and with – arise as sensorial bodies. Based on experiences and acts interwoven with micro-phenomenological interviews, this project works towards actualisations of politicised practice and articulations of immanent ethical forces, emerging where encounters, collisions and generative resistances occur between people, but also between fields of practices.

Project Team:

• Mariella Greil (principal investigator)
• Walter Lauterer (dialogue partner – choreographic environment)
• Werner Moebius (dialogue partner – sound)

Keywords: choreo-ethics / diffractive dialogue score / polylogic lab