Performance

“On the Margin of History” is a witness of the destruction of ancient history and the sharp demographic change in Aleppo (Syria), Mohamad Kebbewar’s home town, a city of six million people that lost ninety percent of its residents over the course of six years. It is the witness of the breakdown of former Yugoslavia, Natasha Boskic’s homeland, culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia where silence was the only response to events. It is a transdisciplinary project that considers the tensions between personal voice and story and the possibilities of the digital visuals, done by Mary McDonald, to suggest and reinforce false narratives and/or to create understandings through metaphor, playing with all levels of our perception. It attempts to reframe our consciousness to find empathy and closeness, humanity in chaos. The ”Margin” tells the true cost of war — the reverberating loss of the destruction of people and place, family, heritage, traditions, and cultures. These brief fragments of poem and film enhance the experience of the surreal and feelings of displacement. Artistic creation is a kind of healing, and letting go of war and decomposition of life. Even when we chose to leave them behind, they never leave us.

Blister Skin is a hyper-local and hyper-ephemeral intervention in filter bubbling. We are so used to being alone with the internet that our actions there feel private as a bedroom or a body: screensharing may make our typing slow or anxious, we may choose cafe seats that shield our computer screens from strangers’ eyes, and questions about our phone activity may feel invasive. Algorithms of such companies as Google and Facebook further alienate our online lives by making the internet we live in materially different from that occupied by our friends. Indeed, while our activity online is near-invisible to those around us, it is transparent to those companies. This online alienization, of course, leads to radicalization with grim political effects -- for example, the election of the current American president. Blister Skin invites us to invade the (capitalist white American straight cis-male) bot gaze by watching what others do online. It thus reminds us that we are not alone with our screens, but constantly watched/directed. At the same time it reveals, through subtle differences in search habits, how distinct our internet lives have become. Though many video-contributors reported meaningful discomfort while recording their online searches, the more radical gesture of Blister Skin is the viewers’ watching. I chose the subject of fear because it is the (deeply private) experience I most associate with filter bubbling: we bubble for fear; our bubbling incites fear through radicalization; I fear bubbling. The text reminds viewers/readers that Blister Skin is soaked in my own local subjectivity/bubbling. After all, while the videos expose my friends’ bubbles hyper-locally and hyper-ephemerally, collectively they tell a much clearer story about me.

“The Buoy” is a work of poetic auto-fiction that functions as a performative powerpoint presentation. Drawing inspiration from long tradition of concrete poetry, “The Buoy” is structured by a series of diagrams that strive to create a new form of language for dealing with topical political issues involving marginalized identities. The formal progression of related diagrams serves to simultaneously defamiliarize our current perceptions about language as a communications medium and to allow for new meanings and associations about language and identity to emerge. The content of the piece asks the following questions: How do we talk about things that are hard to understand? How do we talk about ourselves? How do we talk to others? How do we talk to others about ourselves? And, ultimately, how do we communicate across existing societal and political barriers? The thematics of the piece are concerned with a personal history of growing up queer in Texas, a state that remains socially conservative despite work being done to advance queer rights across the United States. The piece allows for a new way of thinking through aspects of personal identity that may conflict with the context in which one lives. By providing a new mode of signification for communicating these challenging themes, the piece serves to complicate and critique the ways we currently talk about both social issues (on a large scale) and moments of contention in our daily lives (on a personal level). Furthermore, the content of the performance zooms in on the personal, detailing the challenges that emerge with one’s family of origin and how such relationships shift and evolve during the period of emerging adulthood. In an attempt to interact with these fraught concepts, the piece weaves together a variety of texts and theoretical arguments to further emphasize the ways we work to conceptualize and stitch together our own identities and then to communicate those identities to others. How do we talk about who we are? How do we talk about who we are with those closest to us? How do we talk about who we are when we’re worried others will fail to understand? Specifically, the piece employs tactical concepts in sailboat racing, terminology presented by cultural theorist, Eve Sedgwick, in her text Touching Feeling, and larger theories surrounding semiotics and language, as it strives to provide answers to such questions.

Eververse is a project which synthesises perspectives from disciplines in the humanities and sciences to develop critical and creative explorations of poetry and poetic identity in the digital age. Eververse sends biometric data from a fitness tracking device worn by the poet to its custom-built poetry generator. This generator utilises NLG techniques to output poetic text published in real time, and 24/7, on the Eververse website.

“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

[(DES)CONEXÃO (2018), by artist collectivewreading digits, in collaboration with media artist Pedro Ferreira, is a cyberpoetic artifact developed under the artistic residency “Realtime Runtime People”, promoted by the INVITROgerador (Universidade Aberta). Having its first instantiation [realtime], in July 2018, at Atelier Concorde Lisbon, as a #cyberpoetic installation complemented with #livecoding #liveremixing#performance, (DES)CONEXÃO was also presented at ARTeFACTo 2018, without its digital component. The intention at stake here was to reinforce itsinitial questioning – a reflection on the ways technologies alter our perception of time –, by giving visibility and expressiveness to textual and poetic layers behind the surface of the artifact. In dissecting the machine and its fragmented layers of different data, certain experimental writing techniques used, that allow us to extend the word, and therefore the text,  – such as combinatorics, literary cut-ups, or fold-ins – are cut wide open. Beyond the circular walls of its anatomical theatre, the remains of these mediated and transmutated philosophical stone(s), once modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated were revealed. In runtime.

"Locusta temporis" is a journey through time and imagination. The story begins in contemporary France, where a couple of young students are struggling with an archaeological discovery capable of changing their lives and transporting them to places and times that are definitely unexpected. Suitable for adults and children, it consists of nine chapters full of twists, in which the reader actively participates in the unfolding of the affair and the solution of problems.

Source: https://www.ibs.it/locusta-temporis-ebook-enrico-colombini/e/9788896922…

"Verrà H.P. e avrà i tuoi occhi" is a story of a love that has split. It is the story of the father. It's the story of a game that has no rules, it's the delirium of a sick person. It is a story that does not want to become a novel, but that must be told the same, going back, imagining what could have happened. Imagining all the things that could have happened. Provided that the connection does not fall.

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9337893-verr-h-p-e-avr-i-tuoi-occhi

"Chi ha ucciso David Crane?" (2010) is a "possibility" story and it has a single page beginning of the story and a reduced number of end pages. The novel is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, who proposes to the reader from time to time the choices to continue reading of the single story. At the beginning of the story the reader finds himself in a dangerous situation for the protagonist, and immediately he is offered an important choice: continue the current story or remember the previous facts to understand, in a long flashback, the reason why the protagonist he is in that situation. The choice is important from the point of view of the narrative because, in the case you choose to live the current story, it will no longer be possible to go back to reading the flashback (unless you start the novel from the beginning). Vice versa, the choice to read the flashback will allow, at its end, to resume the events "current" and to read the story started on the first page.

Source: http://www.parolata.it/Letterarie/Iperromanzo/IperCrane.htm

aimisola.net/hymiwo.po: a poemtrack for a yet-to-be-written dance piece departs from material produced by AIMISOLA, in respect to the project “voices of immigrant women,” and further research developed by Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen on immigration, Spanish immigration policies, cultural, social and political issues in Spain. The first-person poem addresses immigrant women in long-term unemployment living in Spain, and the social, professional, linguistic, and educational obstacles that they face. The poem intends to be a possible account and denouncement of immigration, migration, and dislocation aspects, in a broader global scope, though more specifically, in the European context: rootlessness, social and personal hopes, women’s rights, social, gender and sexual inequality and aggression.The poem starts with an onscreen display of keywords used to write the poem, some of which are hash-tagged. As the poem unfolds onscreen, displaying a fixed line at a set temporal interval, these recurrent keywords scrape real-time tweets. The resulting display is a poetic mash-up of collective text, composed of background and foreground. The combined text can act as textual and visual texture, or active multimodal reading. However, it functions as a timely snapshot of a certain collective consciousness or, perhaps better, it provides an update debate on topics related to the poem that are happening as collective discourse in social media.The coding mechanics create tensions by juxtaposing a fixed (non-)poetic text with an ever-changing social(-poetic) text, which might be further complicated by the way certain tweets contradict or amplify the lines, or even when the audience participates by inputting tweets as the poem is live performed. Furthermore, interactivity is keyboard-driven. Arrow keys control line display and the avatar (“silence”) progression, as well as a visual representation of duration. The reading progression through the language game questions modes and functions of reading, and roles and boundaries between viewer, reader, user, and player. The “intermezzo” game acts as a scene, or “poemscreen,” using the BSoD as glitch source. An error display screen, the side-scroll game thus critically dialogues with game mechanics, OS errors and factual ocean traversals in the Mediterranean Sea. The very act of reading/living continues only if the reader/player traverses the poemscreen.aimisola.net/hymiwo.po was originally written in Portuguese and translated into Spanish and English. The soundtrack is “Lighthouse” (2011), by the Swedish jazz band Tonbruket.Start work at http://aimisola.net/hymiwo.po 

(Source: Author's Website)

"Voices of Immigrant Women" is a digital project in which AIMISOLA project's members have developed digital poems written for the Web, based on the experiences of immigrant women in long-­term unemployment living in Spain. Their testimonies have been recorded as sound files, images, and videos. The work has been done in Portuguese, Spanish and English language.

This work was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2016: http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/past-winners/2016-shortlist/

(Source: Nina Kovolic)

“Buscando Al Sr. Goodbar” is a journey through Murcia, Spain that involves a search for the locations and authors of various YouTube videos produced in the city.

If the longitude and latitude coordinates are included with a video when publishing it on YouTube, then this video automatically appears on a GoogleEarth map and connects it to a physical location. A link is therefore made between the YouTube video and where it was produced in the city.

A bus tour was organized by Michelle Teran, who visited Murcia repeatedly via GoogleEarth and started to get to know intimately some of the people living there through the YouTube videos they produced. As the bus moved through the city, its movements along the streets were mirrored on a GoogleEarth map. YouTube videos were played corresponding to where they appeared on the map and could be viewed on a large flat screen.

In this way the audience on the bus witnessed short glimpses of what the city had to offer and started to meet some of the people living there. Somebody solved a Rubik’s cube in under 2 minutes, a young man played the piano, a group of friends drunkenly sung together, a 14 year old boy showed off his headbanging skills, somebody choked his friend and caused him to pass out, somebody played a video game,  a man taught himself Arabic, two people fell in love, a festival happened on the street.

At certain points during the performance  – led by Irene Verdú, an actress from Murcia –  the bus stopped and the public met some of the YouTube authors who presented them with a reenactment of some of their performances.

Through this intervention an intimate encounter was created between video producer and public by entering into people’s homes and the various sites where these videos were made.

(Source: Website)