Visiting Portal10

I had the pleasure of giving a workshop with Thom Kiraly at Portal10 in Krakow on the midsummer weekend. Among other things I tried out the prototype for mobile phones created with Nea Landin.

The material draws inspiration from Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication:

The body as a stage, the landscape as a stage, and time as a stage are slowly disappearing. The same holds true for the public space: the theatre of the social and of politics are progressively being reduced to a shapeless, multiheaded body. 

The Unquiet Veil at A thinking practice

A Thinking Practice is a practice based symposium addressing collective learning processes in relation to listening, asymmetries, filth, not-knowing and desire. We long for a space to think, feel, organize and practice with others. A space where we, despite knowing that we won’t find any simple solutions, engage with each other in an unknown future.

The symposium is initiated from an interest in working collectively, from the perspective of the fields of choreography and urban planning. We believe that in times of urgencies, in moments of doubt, in seconds of fear, we must gather and think. And thinking does not mean big Thought, but a practice which involves every nerve and every relation. A thinking that involves paying attention to that which is already there in order to imagine what could be. We notice each other because we are at stake to each other.

The focus of the symposium is to practically investigate forms of thinking. We believe that all thoughts are thought from somewhere – in relation to a practice and to thoughts previously thought. We therefore see that how we think is crucial for what we think. Through which practices can we attune ourselves to listen for that which we do not already know? What practices of attention help us to be available for others, for the not-understandable, for the opaque? And how can we encourage each other to think, in all its multitude of practices, in order to create collective change?

PRESENTING AT THE SYMPOSIUM Eduardo Abrantes, Juli Apponen, Eleanor Bauer, Áron Birtalan, Åsa Bjerndell, Amy Boulton, Oda Brekke, Xiyao Chen, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Rosa Danenberg, Laressa Dickey, Disorder, Darya Efrat, Anna Enström, Benj Gerdes, Tiril Hasselknippe, Sara Kaaman, Elke Krasny, Carmen Lael Hines, Ying-Tzu Lin, Pedram Nasouri, Chrysa Parkinson, Kibandu Pello-Esso, Sophia Persson, Pontus Pettersson, Tuija Roberntz, Tove Salmgren, Alexis Steeves, Ellen Söderhult, Cara Tolmie, Ana Vujanovic, Gabriel Widing, Andros Zins-Browne, Jenny Övergaard

PRACTICAL INFORMATION The symposium takes place at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus at 10-17 on the 10-11th of June. Detailed program will be announced shortly. Participation is free and a detailed program will soon be presented. Register at: anmalan@medborgarhuset.se.

THE UNQUIET VEIL – A Living Person’s Guide to Death Magick in Four Unfinished Songs

I will co-host this scenario with its maker Áron Birtalan.

The Unquiet Veil is a low-key role-playing experience / fictional workshop where players are guided through playful and mystical activities in which they develop their own practice of ‘everyday death magick’, make a pact with an imaginary entity, and create a spellbook that they take with themselves after the event.

The experience brings together pretend-play magick, electronic music, office protocols and playful more-than-human imagination. It also features a synthesizer that casts spells, a band of singing undertakers and lots of metaphysical bureaucracy.

Prototyping for movement with mobile phones

Playtesting

I’ve been spending a week with dancer and artist Nea Landin at a residency initiated by Danscentrum in a new studio in Stockholm called Söderkupolen. We met in a coding course at Konstfack and have similar interests in instruction based performances. In the residency we started working with real-time multi-user web technologies. Instructions are distributed through the participants mobile phones. These ideas have a lot of potential and I think we are only in the very beginning of something very exciting. Even if the instructions are simple they can mobilise big audience numbers in collective action.

Prototype screenshots

We drew some inspiration from a really nice article (in Swedish, in Hjärnstorm) by Rasmus Fleischer, outlining some anthropological insights from Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History written by William H. McNeill.

Some snippets from McNeill:

Moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large.

“Boundary loss” is the individual and “feeling they are one” is the collective way of looking at the same thing: a blurring of self-awareness and the heightening of fellow-feeling with all who share in the dance.

Co-hosting The Unquiet Veil

This week I’ve been working with Áron Birtalan in a part of their PhD project Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come. The piece is titled The Unquiet Veil – A Living Person’s Guide to Death Magick in Four Unfinished Songs. As iwth many participatory proposals it’s somewhere between a workshop and a scenario and we are guiding the participants through different aesthetically informed activities.

The Unquiet Veil is a low-key role-playing experience / fictional workshop where players are guided through playful and mystical activities in which they develop their own practice of ‘everyday death magick’, make a pact with an imaginary entity, and create a spellbook that they take with themselves after the event.

The experience brings together pretend-play magick, electronic music, office protocols and playful more-than-human imagination. It also features a synthesizer that casts spells, a band of singing undertakers and lots of metaphysical bureaucracy.

The piece is available for touring. More info here.

Coded poetry at Twisted shout #1, Fylkingen

Twisted Shout Poster

I will show my 9-page hell poem the void is positively charged at Twisted shout text-sound-festival at Fylkingen. The list of live acts is juicy:

* Gå på stället vocal duo
* Casey Moir vocal
* Beatboxer Mathias Yilbar
* WOL performance duo
* Performance/talk by Ilmar Laaban expert Jan Malin from Tallin
* Pyspunka – performance piece by Teddy Hultberg

You are very welcome!

Ekstasis in progress

Ekstasis Icon

Me, Ebba and Elize from Nyxxx is working with Leo from Pusselbit games to produce a 4-player synchronized app scenario under the title Ekstasis. It is written for four friends and can be played/performed at home with standard mobile phones and head phones.

This time we decided to do the voice work ourselves so we have been in Bagisstudion making recordings including instructions, dialogue and a demon.

Recording in studio

The script was written over the summer by me and Ebba. It is revolves around a feeling of loosing control. This feeling is manifested by an inner demonic voice possessing the roles of the scenario one by one.

Here is a prototype, made in Unity, with a Firebase connection to interconnect the players:

The players can make a few choices that forks the story. Will you resist or let go?

Find out on December 3rd when the app is released on iOS’ App store and Android’s Google Play.

The project is funded by Kulturrådet & Region Gävleborg

Artes Participativas

Cover

A Portuguese/Brazilian translation of Deltagarkultur has dropped in the shape of Artes Participativas.

Thank you Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama for translating it and to Luiz Falcão for a proper re-enactment of the original shape and form. It is published by NpLarp and Editora Provocare. The book was written 2008 by Kristoffer Haggren, Elge Larsson and Andrea Nordwall.

Read more about it and get the digital version

Twelve talking dolls: The Subjects

You take care of the dolls. The dolls will take care of you.

Meet the twelve talking dolls. They scream, cry and comfort, threaten and pray, seduce and order, invoke and plead, explain, hypnotize, confess and terrorize. As an audience member you can pick the dolls up and hold them, take care of them and manipulate them. Or just listen. Together with the other participants in the piece, you create the condition that enables the dolls to appear as a part of your human kinship.

The doll is a thing, but also a body. It has arms and legs, eyes and mouth. When you look at the doll, it returns the gaze. It is speaking and singing. It becomes one of all these objects that ting and pling around you, demanding different types of response. We can have feelings for the doll, tenderness and care, but also nervosity or unease. It is in a borderland creature between life and death. The doll is undead. And it wants something from you.

The piece presents unique handmade stoneware dolls equipped with responsive but pre-recorded voices belonging to twelve different actors. The voices create a polyphonic soundscape that the participants enter, shape and are shaped by. They can also choose to just listen and watch.

Here, a door opens to a playful and eerie world where the dolls are in power precisely through being dolls.

Idea, text, composition, dolls: Nyxxx Voices: Nyxxx, Adriana Aburto Essén, John Alexander Eriksson, André Nilsson, Ellen Norlund, Benjamin Quigley, Francisco Sobrado, Ylva Törnlund and Malou Zilliacus. Costume design: Sofia Luna