We Can Work It Out - Calibration as Artistic Method

Anna Einarsson
2015 Ruukku  
The body exists in space and time. It moves through cultural spaces and temporal rhythms. In the combination of instantiated actions and environmental conditions a context is created, this through embodiment. In this thesis I will attempt to link definitions of embodiment with the process of creating and performing new sound theatre works that involve live interaction with media technology. I will also examine terms such as inscription or incorporation and their application to processes of
more » ... ing and memory within a particular context of inter-disciplinary skills. Finally, in the light of this genre, I will approach the problematic of analytical procedures that change the very parameters of embodied knowledge. The term sound theatre could be defined as a shift of play between music, image and text, incorporating elements such as gesture, choreography, audio and visual technology into a compositional dialogue. However this approach demands a reexamination of the spatial and temporal aspects involved in such inter-activity and their consequent relation to the performer. Taking the starting-point of sound and movement within the body of the performer, my research involves investigations into medial extensions of embodiment that have developed through a discourse with machines. This project takes an essentially practical basis for its research in the form of collaborations with musicians and practitioners of media technology towards a creative product. The result is a series of written compositions, each of which examines a different aspect of sound theatre. The valuable exchange that takes place during such a situation of experimentation becomes equally as important as the final product, providing much of the material framework for issues such as terminology and analytical procedures that concern my investigation. We sense things, we follow a trail' (Derrida in Zielinski 2006: 26). I am concerned here with the possibility of acquiring skills as well as acknowledging pre-existing ones, of challenging ‗safe' performance situations in which highly-skilled musicians, in particular, find themselves. As Heiner Goebbels indicates in an essay on the situation of new music today, ‗the training of musicians has little than ever to do with current aesthetic impulses and their formative structures' (Goebbels 2002a: 187, ‗die Ausbildung der Musiker hat mit den äesthetischen Impulsen der Gegenwart und den diese prägenden Strukturen weniger denn je zu tun'). In order to reach any form of understanding of one's own or others' disciplines it is important to create an improvisatory environment in which exchange and learning can take placein short, a laboratory. Thus the role of improvisation can become a key factor in generating more awareness on the part of its practitioners of these possible, and as yet, unnamed combinations. It would seem vital to apply a method of evaluating the process of a work, a history of its making, as it were, to these questions. This somewhat scientific and academic approach that went under the name of ‗critique génétique' (Genette 1988: 27), found its origins in the Structuralist movement of the 1970s, when it was applied to research in literature. It emphasizes the importance of a parallel intra-text that accompanies the actual work during its formation. Is it possible to set up a meta-discourse between these disciplines, so that they themselves enter into a dialogue on this higher level? In his essay on virtuosity (2003) Nicholas Till poses this question together with that of possible roles, of music as the object and theatre as a possible methodology of research. His argument raises the question of translation between disciplines, of bringing them into communication with each other, so that they come and go as a game. Writing on the experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration, author Siegfried Hüttenbrink defines two possible modes of relation between the practitioners: Translation that carries, imports or exports from one side of the river to the other, always throws a bridge. The act [...] remains a static, one-way crossing. [...] Instead it's about making a detour by means of the other, following each other in parallel from one side of the river to the other. [...] Create locations. [...] Always maintain a temporal distance with regard to the other, by means of an echo.
doi:10.22501/ruu.142373 fatcat:joxhbxngdjclbmmrn54ixfiega