Panel 4: Voicing and personification as method
Andy Weir, Polymerized Flow Snag , (video, 10 mins)
Part of a body of new work, this two-screen video presented as single-screen work stages a dialogue between two entities as they merge and become one entity. One voice is a fragment of meteorite - landed, removed, traded, looted, broken up and flushed away, where it merges with the other entity, a sewer blocking fatberg under the City of London.
Jane Norris – ‘More than Human Ekphrasis – voicing sentient others.’ (performance, 20 mins)
This presentation/performance explores some questions raised by the practice of expanded ekphrasis - the reimagining of communication across different species, transposing plant, and material sentience. Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira in ‘Design at the Ear View’ suggests sonic fiction is the proposal for a radical divorce from so-called universal (Eurocentric) theories to make room for other systems to claim their space (Vieira de Oliveira 2016:48). Is sound a powerful communicator that can bypass our western anthropocentric hierarchies of communication and authorship?
I will play short bio-electric recordings of my interactions with Polyscias Scutellaria (Poly) made during lockdown. These audio pieces ‘The Sounds of Plants Waiting’ highlight the reaction of Poly to my touch, introducing listening in new ways, and the question of selecting a ‘voice’. Listening suggests the dynamic relationship of taking notice and acting in response to sound, ‘they listened’ implies a change of behaviour. How does hearing other beings put different understandings and actions within reach for us?
This practice is extended to technological objects, where recordings reveal the sound of electromagnetic pulses that are continually emitting from devices such as keyboards. As Yuk Hui affirms in The Existence of Digital Objects: ’The artificial and the natural are not two separate realms, they constitute a dynamic system’. (Hui 2016 :1) Does communication between tech and plants occur?
A further extension is explored through writing, I will read an excerpt from Re-Pairing a speculative novel (in progress) that ‘voices’ objects in distinct ways – a toxic stainless-steel teaspoon as prose poem threaded through the work and objects in a Lab written as a Greek chorus that comment on the human narrative, building off Sartre’s Nausea and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. How do plant/tec sounds move into speculative writing effectively?
Biography
Jane Norris has a cross disciplinary practice in speculative writing, sonic material explorations, and digital media. She undertook post-doctoral research for two years in critical writing at the Royal College of Art and is currently writing a speculative novel Re-Pairing which gives voice to sentient materials. Jane has also had several speculative short stories published in anthologies such at 22 Ideas About the Future and Virtual Signals. She has a background in fine art (sculpture, video, and sound) and previously lead a 3D Design Craft degree teaching material exploration and contextual studies. She has exhibited across the UK and has shown work internationally at: Le Forum, Geneva, and RaMoMa the new Museum of Modern Art in Nairobi Kenya. Jane guest lectures, on the Planet MA, Kolding University Denmark. She is Associate Dean at Richmond University, the American University in London.
Laura Cooper, Lessons in Leadership, (video, 13mins, 2022)
Lessons in Leadership explores the potential and problematics of EAL (Equine Assisted Learning) where horses are used as training tools in corporate and business leadership programs. Although horses could have a lot to teach us about embodied learning, awareness and more horizontal leadership structures, the video questions the problematics of appropriating and translating another animal into human capitalist systems and power structures. This video is the result of a year of documentary research with EAL facilitators, as well as filming wild welsh mountain ponies and learning to horse whisper through embodied training experiences. It is part of a larger body of work explore human-horse-place relationships.
Biography
Laura Cooper is a British artist and filmmaker. She has exhibited and participated in residencies internationally. Solo exhibitions include Softening the Grid, Milton Keynes Arts Centre 2018, Nomadic Glow, Centro ADM Mexico City 2015, Soft Revolutions, Space In Between Gallery, London 2013. Selected group presentations include Showroom gallery, Rich Mix Cinema, The Tate Britain and Ikon Gallery. Selected artists residencies include Land Art Mongolia 360°Biennale, where she worked with a nomadic Herdsman to create the video installation Colour Poem for Hyesous’ Herd 2015, PRAKSIS Olso Residency, Norway and Residency 108. NY, USA, where she made the film Lure 2017. She was awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund 2013, International Artist Development Funding 2014 and Arts Council England Grant 2018. Laura was commissioned by Groundworks to make the film Eating Up the Sky 2018, working with falconers and scientists at Oxford University. She was artist in residence with Grand Union at Bruntwood Works 2020-22, creating the project The Future is Soft.
Charlie Tweed - Notes on the subsurface (2020-23) (performance 15 mins)
The evolving performance lecture considers the value of fictioning and voicing as a method for engaging with non human forms of life. It proposes the deep subsurface laboratory as a means for studying microbial lifeforms that can function at immense depths and within extreme conditions, re-imagining a speculative future for the human deep underground. The work was initially developed during a fellowship in Bristol University's Life Sciences department as part of the EarthArt programme and has since evolved for a number of different locations and contexts.
Biography
Charlie Tweed is the Postgraduate Coordinator in the School of Art, Film and Media, and the leader of the Material: Art and Technology research group. He is a media artist and practice based researcher who leads the MA Fine Art programme and lectures on media art practice and culture. His performative, digital and video based works have drawn attention to the complex impacts of computational capitalism in terms of resource extraction, ecological destruction and the deployment of digital technologies to manage populations and environment. In his work he employs strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline subversive plans for enhancing and escaping control mechanisms and renegotiating relations with the non-human.
He has exhibited his works internationally with solo shows at public institutions including: The Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol and Aspex Portsmouth. Group shows and film festivals include: Rencontres Internationales, HKW, Berlin; WRO Media Art Biennale, Poland; Nunnery Gallery, London; Meetfactory, Prague; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ICA, London, CCA, Glasgow and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.
Videos on the monitor
Sarah Walker, Stand Still and Smile (2019) (video on monitor)
Stand Still and Smile (2019) is a single-channel video work (8'12) that deals with hierarchies of representation in human-nature relations. There is a growing push in the realm of eco-law to grant legal personhood to landscapes and natural areas, in much the same way that we treat corporations as legal subjects. In considering what it means to crash together ecological awe and anthropomorphism, Fleur and I worked to create a series of videos that eschewed the conventions of landscape photography, and instead used the tropes of portraiture to document residency areas in Cundare, Victoria and Springbrook, Queensland. Much like human subjects, the landscapes vary in their willingness to be photographed and their attitude to the camera. Stand Still and Smile brings humour and disruptive visual codes to our relationships with the nonhuman, and troubles modes of looking and being with 'landscape.'
Full video is here: https://vimeo.com/692048137?share=copy
Biographies
Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer, artist and photographer. She uses comedy, narrative and speculative fiction to create surprising encounters with tensions around death, disaster and catastrophe. She works particularly with immersive binaural sound works, video and text-based installation, and collaborates across live art, participatory performance and theatre. Recent work has included commissions by the NGV, Geelong Gallery, The Unconformity, Platform Arts, MoreArt and councils around Victoria. She was a finalist in the 2019 international MTV RE:DEFINE award and the 45downstairs Emerging Artist Award, and has taken part in residencies across Australia and Asia. Her debut essay collection, The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, won the 2021 Quentin Bryce Award. She has been published widely across Australia, and presented at conferences across Australia and the UK. She is a current PhD candidate at RMIT.
Fleur Kilpatrick is an award-winning playwright, a director and educator. She holds a postgraduate diploma of directing and a Masters in playwriting from the VCAM. Fleur’s plays have won the 2019 Helen Noonan Award (Whale), 2018 Max Afford Playwrights Award (Whale), 2016 Jill Blewett Award (Blessed, Poppy Seed Festival) and 2015 Melbourne Fringe’s Emerging Playwright Award (The City They Burned, Melbourne Fringe, Brisbane Festival). Fleur was a lecturer and producer/programmer at Monash Centre for Theatre and Performance for five years. In 2020, her efforts teaching during lockdown won her the Monash Student Association’s Arts Faculty Teaching Excellence award and saw her short-listed for the university-wide Above and Beyond Award. In her academic work, she researches how we teach care to emerging theatre makers, the new field of staging theatre of climate crisis and how to build and maintain sustainable artistic careers.
Katarina Rankovic – The Story of Room 03 (video on monitor)
"Based on a true event, The Story of Room 03 tells of a fraught encounter between an artist and a haughty exhibition space in a former Georgian home in East London. With only 10 days to go until the scheduled art exhibition, artist and room cannot see eye to eye on creative matters and risk having nothing to show to the public. With the artist's reputation, the room's dignity, and the visitor's satisfaction at stake, unlikely intimacies develop between the three in this love letter to making room.”
Biography
I am an artist, researcher and teacher working on ideas about 'character' through performance, video, writing and drawing. My PhD research project, 'Scripting for Agency', recently passed its viva examination at Goldsmiths College. The project looks at the ways in which 'character' is encoded and run like software — in human personalities, biological organisms and fictional characters. Often concepts like 'freedom' and 'agency' are thought to be opposed to things like 'algorithms', 'computation' and 'scripts', but I try to make artworks that offer a different intuition: that agency can in fact only come into being through scripts — that scripts enable freedom. I experiment with novel writing, play scripts and improvised storytelling in a bid to use text to coax agents of my own. I teach fine art practice at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and am currently a Lecturer in Fine Art in the Painting and Printmaking department at the Glasgow School of Art.
Charlie Tweed - Pit Manifesto (2023) (video 5 mins)
Pit Manifesto (2023) employs the speculative voice of an anonymous microbial lifeform to explore the toxic Berkeley Pit located in Butte, Montana. It considers how the ex copper mine has filled with highly toxic groundwater laden with metals and sulphuric acid so that it is lethal to most forms of life. The work recounts the story of the 10,000 Snow Geese that landed on the lake in 2016, many of them perishing. It considers how a rare type of bacteria derived from the intestines of snow geese has evolved and adapted to survive within its extreme conditions and consume its toxic materials. The video uses a playful approach to consider the hope that evolved forms of life could hold for the future of the human.