Other presenters: Carpa 7 conference

Published 16.8.2021 | Updated 23.8.2021

Session 1: Forms Of Writing (With No Hands)

Thursday 26 August, 12:00–13:30

A Site-Specific Writing Dialogue in Public Space

• Lena Séraphin, Artist and postdoc researcher, Åbo Akademi University

This proposal takes writing to public space where we are influenced by commercial and informative signage. The aim is to do writing based on bodily perception and to let writing bridge the sensorial, corporeal and cerebral. Elas- ticity is regarded as a feature that is launched when doing this writing experiment titled A Site-Specific Writing Dialo- gue in Public Space. Elastic writing is seen as a quality that reaches beyond solitary writing and resists corporate lan- guage that dominates public space – it strives to embrace difference. In this experiment live-writing is further seen as a performative act as the participants writing in public space are observed by passers-by.

Please note that due to the current situation participat- ing can also happen indoors by a window. For the writing parts participants are randomly placed in break out rooms in pairs. We begin with two warm-up scores. Firstly; write 3 minutes without adjectives and secondly write 3 minutes about things/people/beings/animals/phenomena in motion. The two persons alternate doing their 3-minute writing in turns by speaking. The warm-ups take 12 minutes. In the next part writing happens in a spoken dialogue format so that the two persons are engaging in a dialogue of observa- tions for 15 minutes. The session continues with all participants in a discussion based on the experience of writing par- allel to a solitary sphere. A topic is speech and dialogue as writing and if they could be seen as a form of self-publishing. Further topics are the spatial issues and if writing/s can af- firm spatial interconnectivity and/or inter-subjectivity. Writ- ing happens in a language that each writer chooses, includ- ing self-made ones, and one is free to shift between different languages, too. The session pays respect to a shared multi- lingual space, emphasising the tonal and acoustic qualities of spoken language as much as the meaning-sense of words.

Lena Séraphin is an artist and researcher based in Vaasa/ Helsinki. Her research interest is site specific writing/read- ing/listening and publishing as an aesthetic research prac- tice. Site specificity is performed in a public space when a group of writers make notes based on bodily perceptions. The writers interact in a collective score using constraints challenging writing to bridge the cerebral + corporeal. She is co-founder of the SAR Special Interest Group on Lan- guage-based Artistic Research.

Moving Writing – a workshop

• Pauliina Laukkanen, Doctoral Candidate, Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

The knowledge and logic through the body has its own, fleeting quality. In the performing arts, especially in dance, we enter this knowledge, quality and logic, working in the body and through the body. What is this knowledge like, if we try to put it into words, in the moment of experiencing? How does writing affect our experience of/in the moving body, how does the moving body affect the writing – how to bridge the different kinds of experiences and knowledges of the moving body and writing? What comes out if those two are merged? My workshop of Moving Writing explores how writing and movement can be joined together in an effort to capture something of the essence and logic of dance/movement. In this workshop, we will do some move- ment exercises that lead toward experimenting with Moving Writing. Moving Writing is a result of my explorations with my personal movement practice and reflective writing during my doctorate. For participating the workshop, you will need some space to move in, paper or a notebook (larg- er size is preferable, or several pages) and a pen or other writing tool. “A thought emerges during movement / and on the following wave of movement an attempt to write the thought / Time and space are lavished / Now the pen in its turn produces a thought / Movement just is / taking turns / the body is wavelike, so is the thought / Time is in pulses” (an excerpt of a practice, from my journal).

Pauliina Laukkanen is a doctoral candidate at the Per- forming Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. In her research she focuses on creating trauma-sensitive dance pedagogy for adults, promoting self-knowledge and sense of connection attained through dancing and reflective practices. Previously Pauliina has been working on bringing dance to people’s everyday sur- roundings, especially to elderly care units. She enjoys cre- ative practices of writing as tools for self-discovery and for sharing of inner knowledge.

When the Act of Reading is Not Trivial

• Tuomas Laitinen, Doctoral candidate at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

[the reader of this abstract starts to slow down already during the first sentence, and when reaching a full stop, takes a breath. Then the title:] When the Act of Reading is Not Trivial. In theatre, performances are called partici- patory when the form of audience involvement is not conventional. In writing, when unconventional participation is proposed to the reader, the event of reading is highlighted. [the reader of this abstract enters the second parenthe- sis, and feels a cool breeze (real or imagined), making the act of reading light, even playful.] Writing would in that case guide the reader into the act of reading, offering an instructive meta level of text in one way or another. This meta level enhances the event-based or performative na- ture of reading, and bridges literature with performative arts. Espen J. Aarseth, while approaching the subject from the context of electronic literature, has coined the term ergodic literature: “In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” [the third parenthesis serves as a pause.] For CARPA 7, I pro- pose a lecture-performance (in the Medieval Latin sense of the word: ‘lectura’ = a reading) which would take (or guide the readers to take) a stroll in this terrain, considering the intersections of reading, participatory performance art and eventness. The writing, prepared by myself and mate- rialized on paper, is re-instituted as an event when we, the participants of the lecture, attend it through reading. Reflecting the subject of the lecture, the writing will guide the participants into experimenting with a particular kind of collective reading practice. [.]

Tuomas Laitinen: My background is in participatory and experiential forms of theatre and performance art, with a focus on the position of the audience, including the ensuing conflicts and creative possibilities. The body of my work con- tains various performative formats, for example a retreat, week-long mystery plays, fighting circles and children’s the- atre. I have worked as a director, performer, writer, teacher and curator. Currently I am working on an artistic doctor- ate Audience as a Condition (at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki).

Session 2: Dis(guised) Writing

Thursday 26 August, 12:00-13:00

Haunted Writing: Words out of No(every)where

• Susanna Hast, Post doctoral fellow Cerada
• Maryam Bagheri Nesami, University of Auckland

In this co-presentation, we investigate alternative languages of text and body. As a displaced artist, Maryam Bagheri Nesami’s practice of dance writing is a political nego- tiation around homing, gravity, grounding, and belonging. Thinking with Deleuze and Grosz, she takes advantage of the elasticity of boundaries of possibilities and impossibil- ities, the porousness of spaces, the non- linearity of time, and the indeterminate contour of the Body without Organs. Through veiling, she practices (in) an elastic space where the politics of visibility and risk of surveillance is negotiat- ed. Through the embodied practise of veiling, as non-vio- lent resistance, an alternative language is produced inclu- sive to those who cannot afford the linearity, sequentiality, continuity and coherence with the central (dominant) spa- tio-temporality of presence in arts and academia, their ar- chival lineage and history. In the second part of the presen- tation, Susanna Hast uses masks inside text, reassembling a forgotten archive existing beyond the reach of language. She proposes creating a counter-document (Anne Anling Cheng 2001), which abandons sequencing and a continu- um of closed events. Instead, writing emerges wildly from non-existing data and decades of silenced craze. A count- er-document, or counter-archive, is unstable, indirect and while it appears confessional, it is, in fact, loaded with re- fusals. Susanna presents concrete writing techniques for dangerous subjects which she has developed while writing creative non-fiction. Together we approach language and the body from converging and diverging points connected with the thread of subtle resistance.

Dr. Susanna Hast is a researcher, song/writer, singer and body poet. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland,  and part of the Subtle Corporealities: Propositions of Resistance for Creative Practitioners project (funded by Kone Foundation 2020-21).

Maryam Bagheri Nesami is an Iranian dancer and dance writer based in Auckland, Aotearoa NZ. Coming from the underground community of dance in Tehran, Maryam’s PhD research at the University of Auckland focuses on the choreographic practice of solo as a potential site for prac- ticing freedom. She is interested in choreography as an expanded field to discuss topics such as social justice, in- clusion, non-violent resistance, strategic negotiations, and micro-politics. As an artist researcher Maryam has been working on a full time practice-led research project: Subtle Corporealities: Propositions of resistance for creative practitioners, with my colleague Dr. Susanna Hast. This two-year project is funded by Kone Foundation (2020-2022).

Session 4: Techno-Writing

Thursday 26 August, 15:30–17:00

Digital Writing Platforms of the Future: Creative-Critical- Code Writing as Artistic Research and Performance

• Sarah Ciston, PhD. Candidate, University of Southern California

This research investigates writing/reading code and natural language together. It introduces a hybrid form of cre- ative-critical-code writing I practice as artistic research, plus a platform I am developing to support this writing— emphasizing process over product, community collabo- ration, access, legibility, and the plat/form-content rela- tionship. Spaces like Github are already being creatively misused for writing, offering expanded experiences of text, from details like predictive text and syntax highlighting to the holistic digital material object (its drafts, media, hy- perlinks, code, comments). These hint at possibilities for more integrated platforms. Where existing web browsers were designed to hide code “under the hood,” this limits people’s ability to read programming languages as part of writing systems and to engage meaning across the bound- aries of natural and code languages. Obscuring code limits readers’ engagement with writing except in its narrowest static forms—excluding the digital traces of drafts, diffs, comments, shares, and reposts as they exist as part of the writing itself. Instead, I examine how critical-code-embed- ded lyric artistic research essays and other writerly forms could exist as lively documents that reveal and enact their own processes, and trace their authors and collaborations. This proposed form, platform, approach, and ethic has dis- tinct expressive and pedagogical possibilities—expanding the accessibility and interpretability of code, while ques- tioning the siloed terms of academic engagement. Constant- ly digital, we rely on our platforms, “performing live” net- worked to them daily. What do traditional plat/forms ask us to leave out, that this liveness reveals? To rethink coding and writing together as live creative-critical-code compo- sition is to invite the bodies who are composing back into our code and our literary forms—and to imagine new forms that can hold their imperfections, hesitations, revisions, and connections.

Sarah Ciston is a PhD Candidate at University of Southern California, a Fellow at the Humboldt Institute for In- ternet and Society in Berlin, and a graduate of the MFA in Writing from UC San Diego. They also lead Creative Code Collective—an interdisciplinary artist-programmer com- munity. Their projects include an AI system to ‘rewrite’ the inner critic and a chatbot that explains feminism to online misogynists. They are currently developing a zine li- brary called The Intersectional AI Toolkit.

Transcorporeal writing: the interconnectedness between random stimuli in enhancing creativity training and involvement of AI into the practice of writing

• Marija Griniuk, The University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design
• Tue Brisson Mosich, Msc, Roskilde University, Denmark

The contemporary technologies, involving AI, are open- ing the wide spectrum of possibilities to enhance creativity within the academic writing practice, which usually is seen as an individual process. Involvement of AI into the individual writing can be compared to utilizing random stimuli in enhancing creativity methodologies, such as The Creative Platform. The research is exploring the role of text-based stimuli in the practice of academic writing, generated by an AI during the work. By the term transcorporeal writing  the authors present a collaborative writing practice involving a collaboration between the academic writer and AI. The research question within this study is: How to practice transcorporeal writing, uniting the author and AI as a stimuli producer during the practice of creating the academic article? The data collected during the writing experiments in the research group was observations and notes of the group members and the samples of text developed by util- ising AI as the source for stimuli. The AI used during this experiment is OpenAI’s GPT-2. The data is analysed from the perspective of the reflexive research, as the experiment is unfolded within the group of practitioners within performance art, academic writing and computer science. In the discussion the findings are compared to the earlier study by Byrge and Hansen and their concept of The Creative Platform targeted at the interdisciplinary user. The novelty within our experiments is combating creative blocks with- in academic writing by involvement of the newest techno- logical means. We aim to present an article themed around transcorporeal writing, produced by transcorporeal means: involving humans and AI. The research raises the new pos- sibilities of creativity training in the process of individual practice of writing. The presented research would be interesting for all involved in writing practices and interested in methodologies for enhancing individual creativity.

Marija Griniuk is a Lithuanian artist and a PhD Candi- date at the University of Lapland, Finland. Since 2020 she is a lecturer in the subjects of Innovations and Creativity at Vilniaus Kolegija/University of Applied Sciences, Lith- uania. Her research concerns the new channels of perfor- mance documentation, derived from, usually invisible bio- metric data, such as brain activity.

Tue Brisson Mosich, Msc in Computer Science and Perfor- mance Design. After many years of working with music, he now works with artists and in teaching/facilitating positions.

Classic Gold Premium / The Wife of Them All

• Rebecca Close, Doctoral researcher

Classic Gold Premium / The Wife of Them All is a reading-performance of a speculative fiction story accompanied by sound and visuals. Classic, Gold, Premium (CGP) is a net. art work: a tool to consider the forms of reproductive work elicited by the so-called ‘bioeconomy’ as it intersects with internet infrastructures. The CGP interface re-appropriates user data surveillance technologies (local storage) as a device to visualise the ‘value’ of user interaction in real time in terms of ‘bioeconomic work’, ‘affective capital’, ‘data’ and ‘the assisted reproduction of race’. CGP responds to re- search around Europe’s commercial assisted reproductive technology (ART) market. The Wife of Them All is a short story based on personal experiences of networking and family-building in the context of data capitalism, restricted access to assisted reproductive technologies and the concomitant intensification of migratory control. The plot is organized around a ‘heist’ narrative in which the data extracted by data capitalist and bioeconomic platforms is re-appropriated and redistributed as visas and passports. This project dialogues with and pays homage to a lineage of cyberfeminist, blackfeminist, queer marxist and net.art works that have visibilized and appropriated reproductive work as a site of struggle, creativity, love and resistance. Together the works experiment with different registers of technowriting: while CGP ‘publishes’ the labour it elicits and capital it produces in real-time (rehearsing the dy- namics of a possible ‘just interface’), The Wife of Them All constructs through poetry and fiction an alternative to the dominant narratives of reproductive control.

Rebecca Close (b. U.K) is an artist, researcher and poet. Author of valid, virtual, vegetable reality (2018), a book that considers the relationship between technology, lan- guage and desire. They are a Kone Foundation funded Doc- toral candidate in Art at Aalto University, Finland, with a dissertation on post-internet reproductive work. They are one-half of transfeminist and antiracist artistic research duo @criticaldías.

Session 5: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Thursday 26 August, 15:30-17:00

The secret writing of the Samaúma

• Laura Castro, University of Bahia Candice Didonet, Assistant Professor (Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil)

SAMAÚMA is an enormous tree from the Amazon Forest, but it can also be found all over Brazil. Many indigenous peoples understand samaúma as a living library. Its large roots are a kind of device to communicate within the forest, through the reverberation of sounds. In this proposal, SAMAÚMA presents to us a different way of writing with which we’re going to perform. Taking a tree as a collective body and as a crowd of different beings, like animals, microorganisms and plants, our role will be to create a translatory experience of multiple writings and bodies. In this way, this writing of a community of beings metab olised in the body of SAMAÚMA makes us think of the power of reading it as a cosmopolitical writing, and gives us a chance to notice that writing is a trace existing in multiple senses. The SAMAUMA’s body is full of life blood creating a pathway that connects sinuous lines around the trunk. Pathway as a writing. Lines as a materiality/mani- festing of writing. SAMAÚMA is a cellular and ancestral element that connects alive technologies into doing, seeing and saying. The materiality connects moving procedures beyond words and letters. The text of writing is an alive body, strong, like SAMAÚMA’s trunk. A trunk, a tree with an enormous capacity to express their own language. The language of the forest, full of life. SAMAUMA gives us the possibility to address the writing in t(h)ree directions: 1) the power of a cosmopolitical writing, 2) a writing commu nity around the SAMAUMA and its alive technologies, 3) a  need for openness and a profound connection with epistemologies and ontologies of the indigenous peoples from the forest, in an academic and experimental investigation.

Laura Castro is a poet, performer and adjunct profes- sor at University of Bahia, in Brazil, she works in the In- terdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts and the Postgraduate Programme in Visual Arts. Her research interests cross literature in its expanded field and the different material possibilities of writing.

Candice Didonet is an artist of the body and assistant pro- fessor at University of Paraíba in Brazil where she works at the Performing Arts Department. She holds a MA in Dance from the University of Bahia. Her research interests cross the connections between writing and performance bringing images that suggest cosmopolitical views to cho- reography.

Love letters from the Santo Domingo square

• Frida Robles Ponce, PhD. Candidate, University of Applied Arts Vienna

“I do not understand love stories”, was the starting point of an investigation about romantic love; activated by an act of public writing. During three months I worked as a scriven- er at the Santo Domingo public square in Mexico City. My scrivener service was to write love letters, for free. Public scriveners are the professionals that write letters or documents for legal purposes, or for people who cannot read or write. Mexico City still maintains this dying tradition and a community, of approximately 40 scriveners, goes to work everyday at the arcades of the Santo Domingo public square. Being a temporary scrivener was for me a nostalgic act and, as well, a means to have a direct interaction with passers-by. The public scrivener writes in the public space and his or her writing is affected by the other, the client.

This lecture-performance will engage with the outcome and process of this long-durational performance which search- es for the intersections between public writing, artistic gesture in the public space and the possibility of intimacy through the act of writing. A love letter became an excuse for an intimate encounter with the broad public on their re- flections and affections on love. As an artist I am interested in the space that writing can offer, as personally it repre- sent a space of freedom and calmness, as the page brings allows for another temporality. How to then inscribe the page in the public space? How to create encounters through the act of writing? A reflection on this together with a poet- ic reading of fragments of these letters and a performative exercise on sketching with members of the audience a love letter will be part of this lecture-performance.

Frida Robles Ponce is an independent artist and curator. She has been an artist in residence at Q21 (Austria), tran- seuropa festival (Germany), Botkyrka Residency (Sweden), Residency 108 (USA), Raw Academy (Senegal) and Clark House Initiative (India). She is currently a doctoral candi- date at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her thesis focuses on contemporary performance artists from South- ern Africa who deal with traditional healing methods to re- count or embody social, collective and personal pasts.

Could research take the form of a letter?

• Elina Saloranta, Visiting researcher (Cfar)

How to write as an artist? Could a research text take the form of a picture or a letter? These are questions that I posed to myself when working on my doctoral thesis, and as a result, each essay became a test, an experiment in writing. In my postdoctoral research, I continue explor- ing writing by engaging in correspondence with three 19th century sisters. In practice, I read their letters and “reply” to them from today’s perspective. Sometimes the reply is a text, sometimes a video piece. In my presentation, I will introduce my journey as an artist-researcher and show its latest outcome, an 8-minute video piece titled A letter from Liisi (2021). The video is based on a letter from April 17, 1912. On the same day, there was a solar eclipse, which the letter-writer was preparing to view through coloured glass. While waiting for the eclipse, she recalls the death of her sick brother and the birth of her sister’s new baby. The letter is thus a combination of intimate micro-history and huge, universal themes. On the image track, this is reflect- ed by combining family pictures with astronomical glass plates from early 1900s. My questions to the audience are very simple: Do you write letters? If yes, how is it different from writing a research text? What could we learn from the genre and practice of letter-writing?

Elina Saloranta: I am a postdoctoral researcher from the University of the Arts Helsinki. I am also someone who likes to write letters, and while I was working on my doctoral thesis Genre pictures and experiments in writ- ing (2017), I became interested in letter-writing as a genre and practice. As a result, I have now engaged in correspon- dence with three 19th century sisters. I also teach writing to art students and help coordinate the Nordic Summer University’s study circle on artistic research.

Session 6: Dis(guised) Writing

Thursday 26 August, 15:30-17:00

A [new] literacies dissertation: The paradox surrounding the literacy practices in academic research

• Rachel Sanders, Assistant Professor of Literacy, University of Texas at San Antonio

While the existence of new literacies –the modern under- standing of the ways in which individuals communicate with each other– is recognized and discussed, their pro- duction has not yet gained acceptance as being a valid means of intellectual discourse in an academic world still narrowly focused on print-based text. Academic research, for example, continues to take the form of traditional literacy practices and seldomly acknowledges practices of re- search that cannot be captured by the historical definition of the term. Institutes of higher education hold on to an outdated understanding of the term “literate”, and seldom acknowledge research practices falling outside its traditional definition, jeopardizing their relevancy and obstruct- ing the formation of a connection between art and knowledge. To be literate, however, individuals must engage in the consumption and production of diverse language forms, not just one. An important step will be widening the literacy practices doctoral students interact with. As the culmi- nation of a PhD research program, the dissertation should push scholars to move outside familiar well-beaten paths in order to gain new perspectives that enable new questions, and the possibility of change. As a language and liter- acy education scholar, this researcher (a doctoral student at the time) examined the paradox surrounding the litera- cy practices in higher education –specifically the products of academic research– by producing a dissertation written solely outside privileged linguistic forms. Her dissertation and the defense opened to the public as a pop-up event at a local art museum. This presentation focuses on the art of its making, taking a close look at diverse writing processes that support research in new literacy forms. The research- er provides snapshots of her original work, unpacking the “text” from the lens of an author throughout the writing process.

Rachel Sanders received her doctoral degree in language and literacy education after producing a dissertation writ- ten outside privileged linguistic forms. She seeks to broad- en the types of scholarly research compositions accepted within higher education, imperative to advancing academic research in the ever-broadening practices of literacy. With the need for increased attention on writing instruction in mind, her research in new literacies focuses specifically on its production.

(un)prepare to be attacked!

• Stuart Mugridge, Dr. freelance artist/researcher

Setting out from personal experience of doctoral study (employing writing-as-practice for a practice- led Fine Art) this presentation performatively (and playfully) shares reflective observations before casting an eye across the land- scape of conventions within academic or scholarly writ- ing as well as the general demands of rigour and analysis in doctoral working. And what the latter may mean for writing in (practice-led) artistic research. The presentation goes on to offer a selection of propositions or guerrilla tactics that the ‘elastic writer’ may entertain in the context of (disruptive) scholarly endeavour, including camou- flage, undermining, and decoy. All are means of exploring and expressing ideas but, crucially, they are also methods of material generation in themselves, through provocation and vulnerability … (un)prepare to be attacked! Moving on, along the way, this (iterative) generation of material cre- ates a surface of ideas, a surface which grows; a surface of fractal simplicity. However, it is important to attend to the growth of this surface, to listen and act accordingly for it is a pleated surface full of cul-de-sacs and wrong turns (nei- ther of which are bad things as it turns out). It is a land- scape where ideas can be challenged and thought’s images analysed. This research is indebted to Deleuzo-Guattar- ian rhizomatic thought along with the Heideggerian joy and fascination with language (and language as the mat- ter of thought) … as well as his image of the holzwege. The presentation will also place importance in Dr. Kate Love’s work on experience and, in particular, her proposal of the mode ‘writing as a practice in the context of fine art’ in contrast to the more widely used ‘art writing’. The pre- sentation shuns a conclusion, preferring a closure brought about through openness and discussion.

Stuart Mugridge is an independent artist-researcher and word meddler living in Norfolk, England. His work fre- quently deals with themes of landscape and language. Stuart gained a PhD from Birmingham City University (2018) for his thesis entitled -becoming-#langscape-[fold here] in- tra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act. Stuart’s artist’s books are held in public and private collections worldwide.

Propositions for Writing Unfinished Thinking

• Joa Hug, DA (Dance), postdoc artist researcher @ AREAL_Berlin

In my presentation I want to introduce the final written publication of my doctoral research, titled “Propositions for Unfinished Thinking: The Research Score as a Medium of Artistic Research”, which is published on the Research Catalogue. One of the key issues in my research is the di- vision between physical practice and conceptual reflection, and one of its main outcomes is a practice that undermines this division: the so-called ‘research score’. In my thesis, I propose that the research score facilitates a kind of ‘unfin- ished thinking’ (Borgdorff 2011) in which thought is not the property of an individual, intentional, agential subject, but emerges from within an expanded network of inter-corpo- real relations; this kind of unfinished thinking is brought to expression via a way of writing that defies the making of definite statements, and that attempts to maintain the re- lations between language and its ‘affective tonality’ (Man- ning 2013). The challenge in writing the doctoral thesis was to keep alive the artistic qualities and the performa- tive power of the research score, and, at the same time, to meet the criteria for an academic publication as they have been determined by the degree requirements. In my pre- sentation I will revisit some of the propositions made in my thesis in order to test to what extent they STRETCH the boundaries of academic scholarly writing, instead of cut- ting and stilling the artistic practice. These are two ques- tions that I have: 1. Do you think that the DIGITAL PUB- LICATION FORMAT of my thesis benefits the material and aesthetic qualities of the artistic components of the research – or does it actually work against it? 2. Do you think that the digital publication format helps to stretch the boundaries of academic writing in a way that engen- ders new space for breathing and for the release of artistic practice?

Joa Hug (DA Dance/University of the Arts Helsinki) is a Berlin-based artist researcher with an academic background in the humanities and artistic experience as danc- er and performer. His artistic research is crafted around Body Weather performance training and explores the epis- temic potential of touch as a relational technique to re-ne- gotiate the separation between conceptual and more-than- conceptual modes of thinking and writing.

Session 7: Techno-Writing

Phony Writings

• Ana De Almeida, Freelance artist and PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
• Christian Wimplinger, University Assistant and PhD candidate at the Institute of German Philology of the University of Vienna

Freud strongly advises therapists not to write down a sin- gle word during the course of therapy sessions. Instead of taking notes, the therapist should suspend his attention evenly to all the patient’s statements and data, to receive all the information without interpreting or selecting. Thera- pists were advised to do the written report of each session at the end of the day. Freud, himself a writer in his own right, frames this listening technique by the metaphor of the telephone receiver, which is reproducing the unconsciousness of the patient in one’s own. Technically speaking, the telephone is the predecessor of writing devices such as dictation machines, voice recorders, or speech-to-text applications on our nowadays mobile phones. We wonder if these devices could be also linked with the unconscious- ness of their users in a non-metaphorical way? To put it in another way, every act of writing is constituted by a three- fold interplay of symbols, bodies and instruments. Each form of writing is embedded in an historical situation which subjects the act of writing to a specific regime. On the oth- er hand, each writing regime produces specific forms of resistance, which could be understood as articulations of a writing regime’s unconsciousness. From within the field of artistic research, basque artist Jon Mikel Euba deals with the possibility of resistance to conventional writing regimes through the development of an embodied practice that uses writing as a notation system that can be performed. In turn, Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector reinvented writing itself according to the logics of an idiosyncratic process analogue to the process of painting. Our proposal consists of the re- search on the interchangeability between the heard, the written, the performed and the spoken built upon trans-dis- ciplinary practices such as the ones of Lispector and Euba and our own experimental collaboration between the fields of writing studies and artistic research.

Ana de Almeida is an artist from Lisbon living and work- ing in Vienna. Her interdisciplinary artistic practice ad- dresses memory and remembering processes; narrative constructions that connect space and subject; and pluris- patial and multilayered narratives in general. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna and 2021 recipient of the State Grant for Media Art of the Austrian Chancellery for Arts and Culture.

Christian Wimplinger is a university assistant at the In- stitute of German Philology of the University of Vienna, former Junior Fellow at the IFK (International Research Centre for Cultural Studies) in Vienna and is working on a dissertation on cooperative writing with a focus on the collaboration between Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Christian Wimplinger is also an associated member of the research platform ‘Mobile Cultures and Societies’ at the University of Vienna and of the CENTRAL (Central Eu- ropean Network for Teaching and Research in Academ- ic Liason) project Transformations and Transfers. Space and Literary History between the University of Vienna, the Humboldt Universität Berlin and the University of Warsaw.

The Actress The Sequel The Lead The Diva (screening), or, Writing As Between

• Outi Condit, Doctoral fellow at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

In 2017, I worked together with theatre director and doctor- al research fellow Vincent Roumagnac to make the stage piece The Actress, which became the first clearly defined artefact to be produced by my research process. Its suc- cess strengthened my conviction to keep producing ob- jects, even, or perhaps especially, when the object is the researcherly body itself. During the past years I have pro- voked, performed and assembled research apparatuses around the elusive experience of being “more than one, less than many”, inhabited and moulded by relations, matters, (secret) agents, machines, and ghosts, yet still managing to find some space to wriggle. Repeatedly re-inventing “actor- ly” positions through collaborations has become a recur- rent research strategy. Now, as the research winds towards its (however partial and provisional) sedimentation as “commentary”, this strategy asks to become recognised as writing. In Spring 2021, Vincent and I came together again to produce work which is simultaneously an independent piece and the final act of our initial collaboration. We used layered video projection and aural remediation to frame, once and for all, that promiscuous research-object-animal, The Actress, in a Russian doll act of a machine in a machine in a machine. My presentation will be a screening of The Ac- tress The Sequel The Lead The Diva (approx 10 min) accom- panied by a short talk on Writing As Between, introducing my experiences of writing (why call it that?) through undis- ciplined collaborations and transmedial translations.

Outi Condit: I am an actor and performance maker cur- rently finishing my artistic doctoral project “How to be a Medium?” at the Performing Arts Research Centre. In my research I make use of the unfixedness of the actorly stance to tinker with the integrity of staged bodies and bodies-as-stages. My methods include techno-metabolic theatrics and undisciplined collaborations, through which I make art, learn, and teach.

Session 8: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Thursday 26 August, 18:00-18:30

How to Write (about) Piano Music That Might Have Come to an End?

• Nino Jvania, Pianist, PhD, Associate Professor of Tbilisi V. Sarajishili State Conservatoire
• Eka Chabashvili, Composer, DMA, Associate Professor of Tbilisi V. Sarajishili State Conservatoire
• Tamar Zhvania, Pianist, DMA, Teacher of Tbilisi V. Sarajishili State Conservatoire

Since 2018, we have been conducting an artistic research that aims to research sound production techniques of pi- ano in the 21st century. We have been inspired by words of K.Stockhausen who declared, in 1992, that “piano mu- sic has come to an end and something quite different is coming… With the claviers made up to this time, there is nothing new to discover anymore.” The research resulted into a piece composed by a composer Eka Chabashvili in interaction with pianists Nino Jvania and Tamar Zhvania for two pianos, modified piano, video-installations and the virtual piano orchestra. The main aim of the piece Has Pia- no Music Come to an End? is to contradict Stockhausen and demonstrate various new possibilities of engaging acoustic piano in contemporary music. The piece reflects the most important achievements of piano music history and pres- ents one of instrument’s future perspectives – the modified piano developed within the project. The process aiming to bring piano closer to some principles of contemporary mu- sical thinking resulted into changes in tuning system and mechanism of the upright piano. The aleatoric techniques employed by Chabashvili enables us to demonstrate par- ticular aspects of research presenting fragments of the piece. As we all have musicological background, it took us a lot of effort to avoid inclination towards scientific writing and choose appropriate media and formats to present the results of our research. The vision statement of CARPA 7 inspired us to offer to you an experiment: we will present particular research results performing fragments of the piece and demonstrating various artistic types of writing (music, video-installations, literary texts, etc.) and later offer to listeners the verbal explanation of the same ideas formulated in scientific writing style. We will also encour- age audience to interact with us and help us to answer the question – are artistic forms of writing able to precisely convey the research concept and conclusions?

Nino Jvania studied piano and musicology at Tbilisi Con- servatoire and R.Schumann-Hochschule Düsseldorf. She is the prizewinner of various international piano com- petitions and the author of several scholarly works and a monograph. Currently she leads the artistic research project Has Piano Music Come to an End? that is conducted together with a composer Eka Chabashvili and a pianist Tamar Zhvania and financed by Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia.

Eka Chabashvili – composer, prizewinner of internation- al competitions, Doctor of Musical Arts, Associate Pro- fessor at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, Secretary of the Dissertation Board, Manager of Doctoral Studies, Direc- tor of Contemporary Music Development Center, Organizer of Woman and Music festival. She has participated in various international festivals and scientific conferences and has been invited to conduct master classes on composition at the USA and European Universities.

Tamar Zhvania – pianist, Doctor of Musical Arts, teacher at Tbilisi V.Sarajishvili State Conservatoire. She studied at Tbilisi Conservatoire and R.Schumann-Hochschule Düs- seldorf (as a DAAD Grant holder). Prizes: I Prize and the Special Prize of the Mayor of Vienna at the Vienna Inter- national Piano Competition 2006; Diploma of Honor at IV Bialystok International Piano Duo Competition 2008. Tam- ar also participates at international conferences and pub- lishes her papers in national and international periodicals.

Session 9: Dis(guised) Writing

Thursday 26 August, 18:00-19:00

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s

• Sher Doruff, head / mentor THIRD program, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam University of the Arts

The conference’s proposed strand on Dis(guised) Writing speaks directly to my artistic research project of the past seven years. In 2013, I began exploring fabulative storytell- ing as artistic research practice. Opting for a fictive, charac- ter-driven narratives, I wanted to trouble academic writing prescriptives by entangling critical theory with conceptual personae situated in multi-temporal landscapes. Influenced by Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin among many others, a daily lucid dream- ing/journaling praxis slowly warmed up my storytelling skills through techniques that channel theory and philoso- phy, un-disciplinary art practices, peer exchange. Waking life and dream life morph into semi-coherent fables. I took the decision to not overtly reference the many allusions to theorists and makers. This gesture is a nod to speculative literature through the subversion of academic languaging, crafting a writing style that matures through the duration- al rendering of the Last Year at Betty and Bob’s novella tril- ogy. https://punctumbooks.com/people/sher-doruff/ I hope to challenge readers with a subliminal invitation to follow breadcrumb trails and search for clues, easter eggs and the potential of collective more- than-human dreaming in the goings on. For the conference I will perform excerpts from this series. The approach will be to compare this writing process to music mixing – to acute listening, to the layering of tracks of thought, to an embrace of dissonance and com- plex harmonics, to polyrhythms and slippery meters. I will interject the problematics and perceptions of Dis(guised) Writing in Artistic Research in the online lecture performance.

Sher Doruff, PhD., works in the visual, digital, and perfor- mance arts in a variety of capacities. For the past fourteen years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, tutor, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice currently explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. Last Year at Betty and Bob’s An Actual Oc- casion completes her Betty and Bob trilogy, published by 3Ecologies/punctum books.

Work diary as a method in artistic research

• Vanja Hamid Isacson, PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts

Since I started my artistic research 2017 I have been using the work diary as a method. Now 2021, I have hundreds of pages of work diary; how, when and why will I use them? The work diary has first of all been a method for reflec- tion and development of ideas – both on my artistic work, my plays, and on my research questions and in that way leading to knowledge production. At the same time it has become the main documentation of my artistic practice. I am interested in discussing these different aspects of the work diary and how they are combined. I am also inter- ested in the form itself: What is a work diary and how is it written? For whom am I writing? And how? What are the frames of the writing? In my presentation I will talk about these aspects of the work diary: reflection, development of ideas, knowledge production and documentation. I will talk about the “rules” that I have formulated for my work diary and compare them with unformulated rules for my private diary. I will give some examples from my work diary in re- lation to my research: excerpts that I will not use and why not, and excerpts that I will use and why.

Vanja Hamid Isacson is a Swedish playwright and PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts since 2017, where she studies Performative and Mediated Practices with a specialisation in Performing Arts. Her doctoral proj- ect is entitled The potential of Multilingualism in Dramatic Works. It studies the relation between multilingualism and communicative, dramaturgical, political and emotion- al functions through a number of dramatic works. Identity, power and ideology are some of the core themes.

Session 10: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Friday 27 August, 12:00-13:30

Overlapping Bodies – Dramaturgies of Bodily Writing

• Katariina Numminen, doctoral candidate at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki, dramaturg, performance maker

The proposal is about writing as a scenic, performative action. It is a set of performative experiments, which ex- plore writing in relationship to the body. The experiments explore task-based dramaturgical structures, and play with different overlapping bodies that touch each other in the writing: the writing body, the (possible) fictional bod- ies in the text, performers’ bodies, bodies of audience, the body and materiality of the text. In this performative ex- periment writing happens through speech. The experi- ment plays with: Writing as editing, omitting, highlighting the body. Stage directions as a textual genre.The relation-ship of text and action: which one is proceeding and which one is following; to write to instruct /to write to describe? – gesture and dramaturgy – body as a fan of gestures. What  kind of manuscripts are written body? – dream journal as a genre. The presentation stems from the rehearsal pro- cess of the perfomance Käsi (The Hand). Working group consists of a dancer, an actor, of me as a director-drama- turg. The premiere will be in this September. Käsi is the 2nd artistic work of my artistic research doctoral project. The research is about dramaturgy and composition, in the context of task-based working, thinking gesture, interrup- tion and repetition as dramaturgical components. In the research, I am interested in the ludic in dramaturgy, and gestural and bodily in dramaturgical thinking and making. The project is inspired by the concept spacing, creating gaps, as Walter Benjamin describes the Brechtian dramaturgy. Possible topics for feedback and discussion: Writing as a scenic activity, as a gestural activity. Making writing, dramaturgy, dramaturgical relationships visible, scenic, what becomes visible/ tangible? What kind of ges- ture or interruption is writing? gesture and body in writing and in dramaturgy Relationship of overlapping bodies, writing as touching -Agency: who is writing whom?

Katariina Numminen is a Helsinki based performance maker, director, playwright and dramaturg. She is an ar- tistic research doctoral candidate in the Theatre Academy in the University of Arts in Helsinki. Her interests include live composition, live dramaturgy and task-based ways of working. In her practice, she has often been working with documentary material. In addition to the artistic work, she has been teaching extensively dramaturgy, dramatic writing and contemporary performance practices.

Writing for and with Children in Artistic Research

• Tuire Colliander, Doctoral Candidate at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

My presentation introduces drawing as a practice of writ- ing for and with children in artistic research. I will share my experiences gained during the fieldwork in a Helsinki City Kindergarten, where I discovered the potential of drawing as a supportive and essential tool for building common understanding and enhancing the distribution of creative agency. I will start with the example of translating the information sheet for participants into a drawn booklet for the children and the further transformations into em- bodied experiences by dancing the contents of the booklet with the children. In my research I am investigating early years dance pedagogy and focusing on questions of ethical and inclusive means of encounter through dance. My approach is dialogical, and I am working with children as my co-researchers, aiming at deconstructing the adult-child dichotomy and re-distributing the authority of knowledge. I propose that using drawing as a creative means of writ- ing, the communication between an adult and a child as well as among children may become more reciprocal, play- ful and thus supportive for an intra-active artistic co-oper- ation. By applying drawing as a method, it is also possible to choreograph the pedagogical settings in such a manner, that the artistic process becomes more inclusive for par- ticipants with diverse linguistic skills and backgrounds. I will also share a practice for co-creating a choreography through a storyboard method, where the ideas for the choreography are first translated into a series of drawings and used as a score for the dance. Storyboard was an initiative by the children participating in my fieldwork and it be- came a tool for co-constructing, learning and performing a choreography through a reciprocal and playful process. We will make an exploration into the process of the storyboard together with the conference participants in the last part of my presentation.

Tuire Colliander is a dancer, dance pedagogue and PhD student in Tutke, Uniarts Helsinki. Her dance pedagogic background is in the context of basic dance education in Finland. She also works as a freelance dance artist and is a member of contemporary dance company Xaris, Finland. In her doctoral thesis, she is investigating early years dance pedagogy and focusing on questions of ethical and respectful means of encounter through dance.

Writing as Research as Writing

• Nirav Christophe, Professor Performative Processes, HKU Utrecht University of the Arts
• Daniela Moosmann, Researcher in the research collective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes
• Ninke Overbeek, Researcher in the research collective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes
• Marjolijn van den Berg, Researcher in the research collective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes

When artists undertake artistic research, they open up their work and share their creative strategies. The writing describing their research is often considered a way of re- flecting, rationalizing, explaining, and even controlling intu- itive and embodied artistic processes. When we talk about artistic research and writing we should inquire into the phenomenology of writing. Can the writing process mirror the creative making process, by giving voices to the stut- tering, the silence, the body or the not-knowing? The pro- duction processes of writing and researching have become more and more intertwined; the research and the work ex- ist in dialogue with each other. Working from the perspec- tive that dissemination of research can be an intrinsic part of the research and not only a report of research outcomes, we consider the very act of writing as a method of doing re- search. In the research group Beyond free writing within the Professorship Performative Processes of HKU Utrecht Uni- versity of the Art, we explore and inquire how creative writ- ing techniques are used as a method of artistic research and how knowledge on writing processes inform artistic research methodologies. Because we consider both writing practice and artistic research as co-creative activities our presentation will be a collective polyphonic dialogue.

We will stage four crucial activities (writing, researching, teaching and dramaturging) as four performative voices or post- dramatic characters. In this performative polyphony we will suggest, share and discuss four strategies of combining creative writing and artistic research: peer-writing, source-writing, polyphonic writing, and focalization in writ ing. Describing and showing this network of molding strat- egies we hope to articulate the meaning and the beauty of elastic writing in artistic research.

Nirav Christophe writes for theatre and radio and his ra- dio plays have been broadcast in twelve countries. He is an internationally-renowned creative writing lecturer and pedagogue, and has published books as Writing in the Raw; the myths of writing (2008), and more recently Ten Thou- sand Idiots; Poetics, writing process and pedagogy of Writing for Performance based on Bakhtin’s polyphony (2019). Re- search focus: polyphony in transdisciplinary co-creative processes.

Daniela Moosmann, daniela.moosmann@hku.nl BA New Dance Developments, BA Writing for Performance, MA Theatre Studies), HKU-lecturer Writing processes and dramaturgy at BA- and MA- courses. Research focus: contemporary playwriting processes and the use of writing strategies as research methodology in Higher Art Education. Researcher in the research collective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes.

Ninke Overbeek, ninkeoverbeek@gmail.com (BA Writing for Performance, BA Theatre Studies, MA Comparative Cultural Analysis), fiction-author and author for perfor- mance, lecturer writing for performance/ theatre, research focus: ficto-critical writing and connections to embodied knowledges. Researcher in the research collective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes.

Marjolijn van den Berg, marjolijn.vandenberg@hku.nl (BA Writing for Performance, MA Education in Arts), lec- turer Writing as Making within Higher Art Education, research focus: art-writing, generative writing and expe- riential writing education. Researcher in the research col- lective Beyond free writing of the HKU Professorship Performative Processes.

Session 11: Dis(guised) Writing

Friday 27 August, 12:00–13:30

Writ in Rock

• Rolf Hughes, DA (Dance), Professor of the Epistemology of Design-driven Research
• Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture, Newcastle University, UK

The full paper takes the form of a presentation/perfor- mance via an online conferencing platform lasting 30 min utes, including 10 minutes audience feedback. Positioning the locus of writing beyond the human, it questions our anthropocentrism by drawing on the notion that traces of worlds in motion create recognisable details (forms of writing) that can be read if we pay them the appropriate care and attention. Such issues are essential in our great- er literacy for ecological thinking, and actions capable of engendering life-promoting practices. How we may read the writing of the more- than- human realm is not just es- sential for our own understanding but a communications issue in search of a better relating to a changing reality. Raising questions about the recognition of the “other,” the attention paid to atypical subjects and an ethics of care for those we do not easily understand, are subjects for broad- er discussion with respect to artistic research in assessing and deciding what kind of writing works and is valuable in artistic research undertakings. Writing is thus conceived as an ethical undertaking rather than a purely formal con- cern. Our chosen forms of writing direct questions to the critical objectives of artistic research that is ecologically focussed, de- centring the human subject, and inviting new engagements through writing that can be presented in ar- tistic research contexts and publications.

Rolf Hughes is Professor of the Epistemology of De- sign-Driven Research at KU Leuven and Director of Ar- tistic Research for the Experimental Architecture Group which develops pioneering transdisciplinary research, de- sign prototypes and immersive experiences for the emerg- ing ecological era. A prose poet, he applies artistic and design-led research methods to explore ecological episte- mologies that foreground ethical relationships with non-hu- man agencies in architecture, bio-design and beyond.

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architec- ture at the School of Architecture, Newcastle University, Visiting Professor at KU Leuven, a Senior TED Fellow and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rising Waters II con- fab Fellow. She holds a First-Class Honours degree with 2 academic prizes from the University of Cambridge (Girton College), a medical degree from the University of Oxford (The Queen’s College) and a PhD (2014) from the Universi- ty of London (Bartlett School of Architecture).

Writing letters to Trees with the Trees

• Annette Arlander, artist, visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki

This presentation is related to the strand in the sense of being an ”experimental form of writing in artistic research”, with the aim to subtly ”disrupt and displace conventions” and “queer scholarly writing”, related to ”interests in fictioning and speculative fabulation”. The practice of writing letters to trees by the trees, a form of semi-automatic writing addressed to the tree with the camera as witness, has been developed as part of the project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees and explored with various trees in Finnish, Swedish and English. The pre- sentation will include excerpts of videos depicting writing with trees as well as excerpts from the letters. This pre- sentation proposes the perhaps controversial idea that a thought occurring to the writer while writing next to the tree might be provided by the tree, as their contribution to the conversation. This idea can be understood as a literary gesture or dismissed as pure fantasy, but it could also be seen as a possible solution to the dilemma of communicating with trees. Patricia Vieira proposes “the notion of inscription as a possible bridge over the abyss separating humans from the plant world [because] all beings inscribe themselves in their environment and in the existence in those who surround them.” (Vieira 2017, 217) Following this line of thought, although we could expect the human who writes to the tree to be doing the inscription, we could also see the trees inscribing themselves onto the text, which emerges in the encounter.

Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and a peda- gogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. At present she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts University of the Arts Helsinki with the project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees. Her artwork moves between the tra- ditions of performance art, video art and environmental art. See https://annettearlander.com

Heavy writing

• Harri Laakso, Associate professor of photography research, Aalto University

One of the few principles concerning artistic research, that I have been able to hold onto, is that it has to do with the relationship between images and words, and in particular with what resists that relation. The creative research impulse

is directly related to a sense of containment, like a piece of graphite is simultaneously capable of serving a poet’s or a draughtsman’s hand and able to moderate a nuclear reac- tion. A piece of graphite? Yes: A few years back I was able to acquire a few heavy graphite blocks that were unused left- over material of a research nuclear reactor (Finland’s first nuclear reactor FiR1, which operated from 1962 until 2015). Since then, the material has been mostly sitting in my studio, irradiating an air of creative potential tinged with danger. Next to it I have a couple of sacks of bentonite clay, a sub- stance with equally divergent uses, ranging from cat litter to nuclear waste management. The performative lecture, with its direct reference to and use of the graphite, is an exploration of the volatile relation of artistic research writing, oc- curring alongside an artwork (or aside from it). The presen- tation consists of a series of performative acts and (writing) gestures involving the graphite and bentonite as well as a series of musings seeking an appropriate critical mass.

Harri Laakso studied photography and art in New York, Helsinki and Chicago and obtained a Doctor of Arts de- gree in 2003. He is Associate Professor of Photography Research at Aalto University, Finland. Laakso is an artist, researcher and curator interested in photographic images and theory, artistic research and word/image relations. He has led, and participated in, many artistic and research projects, curated exhibitions and published texts related to photography and contemporary art.

Session 13: Techno-Writing

Untitled (Submerged)

• Vincent Roumagnac,Visiting researcher at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

DATA OCEAN THEATRE is a research project at the intersection of performing and visual arts, which specu- lates on the contemporary entanglement of myths, west- ern theatre memory, new media, digital animism, cli- mate emergency, and technological acceleration. The project poses, as a starting point, the physical metaphor of submersion as a contemporary condition and dynam- ic of living, and manifests through a series of polymor- phic artworks and research supplements, based on the consideration of the double phenomenon of 1. the rising sea and ocean levels and 2. the exponential growth of big data in our informational age. The artworks produced in the framework of the project are intended to be simulta- neously performed in diverse art grounded venues and shared through multimedia research expositions. After the first period of eight months of research and a series of inaugural artistic experiments, I propose to disclose in Carpa 7 the encountered writing challenges of the project through a 15’ video essay. In addition to reflecting on the qualities of the video-essay-as-writing in the context of artistic research, I would like to open a dialogue on the project from an artistic point of view and from the corre- spondent perspective of its research iteration through the following questions: how to address the performative ev- er-changing liquidities and the aesthetic opacities of such a pelagic project in a practice of expositional writing that doesn’t solidify the inherent movements and metamor- phoses at play into a contained and stabilized rhetorical object? How to give experiential hospitality to the vast- ness, the unknowability, the depth of the research terrain, and at the same time providing the human community with a research compass for conceptually navigating the inappropriable and unmasterable swell? Are the forces, and correlative weaknesses, at stake in such a project, inevitably leading towards a radicalization of the artistic research language? How to write oceanically?

Vincent Roumagnac is a French-Basque theatre artist and a researcher interested in the way, the notion and the practice of the “stage” evolve through climate-morphing and techno-conditioning. In 2020, Roumagnac completes a Doctorate in Arts in the Performing Arts Research Centre of the University of the Arts of Helsinki based on the artis- tic research project Reacclimating the Stage. Thereafter, he initiates a three-year post-doctoral artistic research project titled DATA OCEAN THEATRE (D.O.T.).

Surrendering to Zoom: composing artistic research and creative practice in a pandemic

• Bruce Barton, Professor and Director, School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary

In the Winter of 2019, I began an artistic research explora- tion focused upon the relationship between human learn- ing and machine learning. The combination of a highly precise, hybrid textual/movement-based score within a chance-based narrative framework requires all present— performers as well as audience members—to be hyper vig- ilant and attentive. To this end, the performances empha- size subtlety, silence, and small scale movement, and the audience was meant to sit in very close proximity to the performers. However, our plans, as so much else within all our lives, were upended in the Spring of 2020. A key question for many theatre artists at this moment relates to the availability of readily accessible technologies for at-distance creation and collaboration. Adopted by theatre practitioners for almost every aspect of creative processes, inexpensive videoconference options such as Zoom, Micro- soft Teams, and Google Meet have quickly demonstrated their considerable versatility—and their substantial short- comings—as sites for collaborative exchange and composi- tion. Explicit technical limitations—such as the programs’ inability to share sound from more than one participant at a time—represent only their most basic of challenges. Beyond these, substantial research has demonstrated the profound cognitive obstacles app-based videoconferencing presents to effective communication. For all of these reasons, videoconferencing would appear to be antithetical to the objectives of the previously described project, with its heightened emphasis on precisely scripted and choreographed interpersonal communication—unless, that is, the substantial complications of such exchange are intentionally embraced as both the form and the content of the performance. Adapting our originally conceived dramaturgy and environment will require us to focus upon, exploit, and surrender to videoconference limitations, rather than try to ignore, work around, or remedy those shortcomings.

Bruce Barton is a performance maker and scholar whose creative practice, practice-based research, and teaching focuses on physical dramaturgies in devised and interme- dial performance. Bruce has published in a wide range of peer-reviewed and professional periodicals and is the au- thor or editor/contributor of seven books. Bruce’s is also the Co-Artistic Director of Vertical City (verticalcityper- formance.com), and the Director of the School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary.

Session 14: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Friday 27 August, 15:30–17:00

Knowing about writing – or writing about knowing?

• Johanna Pentikäinen, Researcher, writer

Landings, paths, edges, and layers – what else? In my es- say, I will discuss contemporary approaches to writing as an open-ended and transformative practice with enor- mous potential of producing spaces of hybrid understand- ing. However, the great contradiction of writing lies in the fact that writing is often defined as an artifact separate from the body that produces it, and accordingly, we often know what it is or should be instead of understanding how to get there. Writers are responsible for the production of their own maps, and even before that, they need to grant access to the landscape. I look at different attempts of de- fining the happening of writing (somatic, nomadic, com- panionship) and some tools that have been used in devel- oping specific site-sensitive writing practices. Additionally, I discuss some hybrid memoirs as examples of how the multi-material writing fiber is produced, collected, and weaved together, as seen from the finished product per- spective. My essay aims to discuss how embodied writing happens and why knowing about writing does not ensure one’s own writing to happen.

Johanna Pentikäinen: I am a devoted writer as well as a writing teacher and researcher. My publications are on teaching literature, writing, and self-reflection skills through reading and movies. Besides that, I have developed a more innovative, reflective, and often arts-informed approach to writing when teaching writing in the universi- ties of art. Recently, I have been writing hybrid essays and fiction.

Conversation-as-material

• Emma Cocker, Nottingham Trent University

Conversation-as-material is an artistic research practice that I have developed over the last decade within a se- ries of collaborations including: (1) Re— (with Rachel Lois Clapham, 2009-2012), (2) The Italic I (with Clare Thorn- ton, 2012-2018); (3) Choreographic Figures (with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, 2014-2019). Within the practice of conversation-as-material, conversation is conceived less as a means for talking about practice, but rather as an aesthetic practice in-and-of itself, site and material for the construction of immanent, inter-subjective modes of verbal-linguistic sense-making emerging through different voices enmeshed in live exchange. Conversation-as-material is a language-based practice that is attentive to, whilst attempting to make tangible, the live(d) experience of aesthetic co-creation. The practice involves an attempt to find a vocabulary for speaking with, through and from the experience of practising, where linguistic content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges in and through a collaborative working-with of language. The rhythm of conversation can produce a different texture of textual articulation to conventional writing. The cadence of conversation — its pitch and intonation, the tempo of speech — can often be of rising and falling, dipping and peaking. Conversation — from con-meaning ‘with, together’, and versare, ‘to turn, bend’. Conversation-as-material is a practice of collaborative writing-with that unfolds through different voices ‘turning about’ together. It involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary generated synchronously to the live circumstances that it seeks to ar- ticulate — an infra-personal poetics co-produced through the dialogic process itself, revealed only in retrospect once recorded conversation has been transcribed, then distilled into a dense poetic form.

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art. Her research unfolds restlessly along the thresh- old between writing/art, including experimental, perfor- mative and collaborative approaches. Cocker was co-re- searcher on the research project Choreo-graphic Figures (2014–2017); a contributing artistic researcher in Ecolo- gies of Practice, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019; and is co- founder of Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research.

If only – writing through the spatiality of the corporeality

• Kirsi Heimonen

This presentation illuminates a process of writing through corporeality in artistic research, in in which the impossi- bility of writing forms a challenge, in which re-writing and erasure, naming and un-naming produce on each occasion a certain kind of temporality through which something from the lived, sensuous experiences of moving may con- tinue to resonate in the text. If only. The writer, within the disappearance of the known I, is lost in between the spa- tialities and temporalities of corporeality influenced by a somatic movement method, the Skinner Releasing Tech- nique (SRT). Walking and standing, pausing and waiting, attuning to the lived experiences through the spatiality of corporeality leads one into a void as darkness and strange- ness demanding the writer to expose oneself into the act of writing not being totally aware of what the written corporeality writes. Nevertheless, something may resonate, something unheard be called forth, given space to linger. In each artistic study, corporality as processual and relation- al becomes a spatial-temporal milieu or a passage through which events are channelled that generates a fragmentary and a spiral way of writing, in which language continues searching, meandering through its various rhythms, si-

lences and pauses going beyond discursive logic. What is the sense of this kind of inscription, in which the unnam- able and vague yet lived resonance with its temporal inten- sity in corporeality may blossom and how much to argue for something that is grounded in darkness, ruptures and gaps? What does writing as forgetting, not naming, efface- ment, loss, violence, being lost or treachery do? Where does this non-personal circular writing approach aimed to nobody lead to, and what about its communicability? The presentation is mainly based on the practice of the Skinner Releasing Technique including theory it contains and writ- ings by Maurice Blanchot.

Dr. Kirsi Heimonen is a University Researcher at the Centre for Artistic Research of the University of the Arts Helsinki. She is an artist-researcher with a background in dance, choreography, somatic movement methods and ex- perimental writing, and her recent interests in artistic re- search have been circling around silence and insanity.

Session 15: Dis(Guised) Writing

Friday 27 August, 15:30-16:30

Internalizing the Strategy

• Mia Seppälä, Doctoral Programme in Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki

The performance Internalization the Matter of Fate is ap- proaching the theme of dis(guised) writing by comment- ing on a newly released University of the Arts strategy. The performance takes place, by the internalization of the new research strategy, in a rather original way. The performance logs out from the normative academic way of writing, re- fusing to respond with the same method or strategy that has been given by the power discourse. Instead, the perfor- mance rewrites the strategy and takes the form of a pictori- al and bodily act that introduces the absurd nature of a situ- ation as a tangible internalization of the strategy text. As is known, free academic research is under the cross pressure of strategic weightings and demands imposed on univer- sities by the Ministry of Education and Culture. If the re- search topic does not fit into a given frame of reference, the existence of research funding and free research as a whole is seriously threatened. Artistic freedom is not threatened in terms of the whole content of the strategy, and not all things that follow from the strategy are negative, but in prin- ciple, the requirements and conditions imposed from the outside are questionable. The strategy, as a means of an ob- jective truth, requires some kind of subjective affirmation to become truth to us, and it is impossible get rid of objective uncertainty other than through faith. Through performative act, it becomes apparent how “strategical truth” becomes humanly significant when an existing subject (researcher) is in an internal relation to it. When we are in a passionate, in- ner relationship to paradox, it is a matter of faith.

Mia Seppälä is an artist, researcher and teacher at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Hel- sinki. Her research interests and artworks are related to photography, performance and demonstration as research, site-specificity and the environment by means of participa- tory art, video, performance and environmental art. She is educated as Master of Fine Arts from the Finnish Acade- my of Fine Arts 2017.

Dirty Words – A Collaborative Editing of Obscenity

• Benjamin Nicholson, PhD Student at University of Southern California, Media Arts + Practice program

In a 1964 United States Supreme Court decision to deter- mine the threshold for what could be considered ‘obscene’, Justice Potter Stewart wrote that, though he could not provide a definition for “hard-core pornography”, “I know it when I see it.” Embedded in this comment is an episte- mological assertion, that there exist phenomena that can- not be known through written signification but rather only through sight, through the experience of seeing. And if knowledge can reside in the experience of seeing, could we not assert knowledge exists in experience as such? Do we not know through being, through doing? In affinity with the notion of Dis(guised) Writing, I propose a collaborative/per- formative experiment in the action of re-writing, otherwise known as ‘editing’: Dirty Words – A Collaborative Editing of Obscenity. Though Dirty Words will exhibit the appar- ent presence of writing (in the form of Justice Stewart’s two-sentence statement regarding obscenity copied into a publicly editable Google Doc), its intervention lies in theinvitation for CARPA 7 participants to enact the heresy of directly and anonymously modifying a ‘source text’ so as to orient it towards our shared experience of ‘the obscene’. In practical terms, I intend to provide a brief teleconference presentation concerning ‘obscenity’ and its implications for the epistemology and ontology of ‘artistic research’; following this presentation, I will provide a URL to a Google Doc containing Justice Stewart’s statement and ask those in attendance to spend 5 minutes performing edits to establish a new and provisional knowledge of ‘the obscene’ through writing; the edited statement will be read aloud at the conclusion of 5 minutes, to be followed by a discussion of what forms of knowing might emerge in the process of profan- ing sacred texts, knowing that exceeds and contrasts what texts may tell us.

Benjamin Nicholson is a writer, musician, performer, and researcher currently pursuing a PhD in USC’s Media Arts + Practice program. Benjamin develops interactive perfor- mance works concerned with collaborative sociality and the limits of subjectivity. His practice and research inter- ests include: the corporation as a model for neoliberal sub- ject formation, necrontology (ontology of dying), and per- formance as prefigurative praxis (PPP). He is particularly fascinated by corpses and potatoes.

Session 16: Techno-Writing

Versificator: Algorithmic poetry and music composition

• Juan Vassallo, Universitetet i Bergen

The piece Versificator for vocal ensemble is conceived as a metaphor for and a manner of bringing alive the original versificator, a fictional device created by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) whose primary purpose is to act as an automated generator for both liter- ature and music. The core of the piece consists of a set of modular text and music generators programmed in Max MSP: The produced text mimics the nature of English language by means of an algorithm capable of determin- ing formal rules according to parameters defined a priori, such as rhyme, alliteration and number of syllables or words per verse; later, a set of computer-assisted compo- sitional tools will generate musical discourse by analyzing the generated text and extracting phonetic information and translating it into musical elements, such as pitches and durations. The work aims to bring the discussion about machine agency in the creation of art, pondering on some relevant inquiries about artificial intelligence, com- puter-assisted generative tools for art, and ultimately on the question of human agency on the process, which – in the words of Benner (2010) – remains ‘something of a mys- tery’, and therefore, since the essence or the basis of agen- cy is not well understood in humans, there are no a priori reason to deny agency to non-humans, such as machines or algorithms.

Juan Vassallo (BMus, MA) is an Argentinian composer, pianist and media artist. Currently he is pursuing his PhD in Artistic Research at the University of Bergen (Nor- way). His music has been premiered internationally and awarded on competitions in France, China and Argenti- na. Currently integrates Azul 514, an experimental musi- cal project based on the interaction between digital sound synthesis, instrumental improvisation and real-time processing of sound.

Simultaneous Writing (Machines)

• Hanns Rutz, Reagenz – Association for Artistic Experiments

The singular “writing” is always suspicious, as the source of truth and authority, as monism. The multiple on the oth- er hand(s) seems like the supreme expression of the algo- rithmic. A potentially endlessly ongoing writing, iteration, recursion, re-instantiation, or as Frieder Nake put it: “The work of art in algorithmic art is the description of an infini- ty of possible works.” Perhaps against the backdrop of cap- italist-industrialist automated production and techno-optimism, when Cage was interviewed about HPSCHD, he said that “in the case of working with another person and with computer facilities, the need to work as though decisions were scarce—as though you had to limit yourself to one idea—is no longer pressing. It’s a change from the influenc- es of scarcity or economy to the influences of abundance and—I’d be willing to say—waste.” Waste, surplus, excess. It is interesting that the work on computers is linked here with collaborative work. How can we arrive at a form of ex- cessive and collaborative writing that does not subscribe to the techno-optimist logic or imperative that all writing should become inter-connectable, compatible, ready for optimisation and exploitation? We want to capture this idea of a surplus writing—writing with machines, through machines, writing with other artists—that resists becom- ing a network node, one that preserves the alterity of each agent in the process, as a simultaneous writing. Instead of defining a topology that assigns positions to each part, to- talising the text’s meaning, simultaneous writing practices hodology, makes pathways, orients different texts towards each other, allowing them to come together in a space with- out establishing cause-and-effect or hierarchy among them. In this presentation, we work with sound and computation. We understand writing as an operation more generic than “linguistic” and discrete writing.

Hanns Holger Rutz is a sound and digital artist, compos- er, performer, and researcher. He holds a PhD in computer music, observing computer-based compositional process- es. In his work, development and research on software and algorithms are crucial. He worked as researcher at the In- stitute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) Graz (AT), most recently leading the project Algorithms that Matter, funded by the FWF programme PEEK. He is chairman of Reagenz – Association for Artistic Experiments.

Session 17: Forms Of Writing (With No Hands)

writing/over/writing

• Paula Kramer, independent artist-researcher, affiliated as visiting researcher at CfAR, Uniarts

This contribution presents > shares > shows > opens my book Suomenlinna | Gropius: Two Contemplations on Body, Movement and Intermateriality, produced in the context of my time as a postdoctoral researcher at CfAR/Uniarts (2016-2019), published in April 2021. This book is com- posed of narration, poetry and theory born out of specif- ic experiences of moving-dancing, being, eating, choreo- graphing, performing, in and with two sites. It is based in embodied research and explores the concept of intermateriality through asking: how does movement and choreog- raphy emerge in collaboration with site? More specifically: how do bodies, materials, sites, organisms, history, tun- ing, training, phenomena, events and the weather inter- mingle and speak, bringing forth what we later might call movement, dance or choreography? My presentation in- troduces and overwrites this book through mixed-media experiments. I will show and read from parts of the book, alongside mixing it with other documentary items from this research period, such as video clips, images, sounds. I will share writing, speak about writing, and mix some live writing in – I will practice writing/over/writing. In the con- text of my working practice all these registers are based in the body, based in experience, based in movement and seek to meet and unfold what embodied writing holds, rather than speaking about it. More about the book can be found here: https://www.triarchypress.net/boje.html.

Paula Kramer (PhD) is an artist-researcher and move- ment artist based in Berlin, specialised in the exploration of intermateriality through site-specific, outdoor dance and movement. In her working practice, she collaborates with materials and organisms of many different orders – as active agents in the making of movement, performance and choreography, and as partners in the creation of daily life and sense-making. www.paulakramer.de

Performing Research, Writing Silence

• Andrew Lock, assistant professor, University of Bergen

I will take my recently completed spoken-word perfor- mance work Between Our Words I Will Trace Your Presence – from which I will perform an excerpt – as the starting point for discussing the place of writing in my work. Specifical- ly, I will explore my artistic research’s capacity to examine different sites of silence; familial, textual and institution- al. My work deals with silence not as a sensate phenom- enon, but as something relational; something enacted or performed, founded in acts of repression and denial; its character always specific to a given set of circumstances, but always characterised by the presence of something un- spoken or unheard. In my examination of such silences, I have found myself adopting strategies which draw on Jane Rendell’s model of ‘site writing’. Also developing a mode of autofiction writing, which is informed by Mona Livholts’ conception of a ‘situated writing’ practice and which lays emphasis on insights localised in the writing-subject’s po- sition. Together, these approaches create a writing subject, whose presence and experience are central to the creation of both site and knowledge. My writing also aspires to a performative – as opposed to an expositional – agency and through spoken word performances, I have been perform- ing my writing. In this presentation, I will discuss my writ- ing practice and introduce the issues raised by the propo- sition that my writing and my performance of my research have the potential to create distinctive relationships be- tween researcher, knowledge and audience.

Andrew Lock is an artist, researcher and educator. Andy Lock is currently an assistant professor at the University of Bergen’s faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, where between 2016 and 2020, he was a Research Fellow. He has exhibited internationally and his current artistic research has appeared through commissions, presentations, exhibi- tions and other events, in Germany, Sweden, Cyprus and Norway since 2016; most recently published as part of Flu- id Territories (2020), Sandborg et al.

Session 18: Dis(Guised) Writing

Friday 27 August, 18:00–19:00

MONSTERRERS & HURRORS Oops! Did something go wrong?

• Karolina Kucia, doctoral student at Performing Arts Research Centre Tutke, Theatre Academy, Uniarts Helsinki

What and where do you see as monstrous? The horrors of haunting pasts? Abuses of the present form of power? Or unthinkable futures? Monstrous mutates and leaks from unnamable into casual, from casual to unnamable, in time. Wouldn’t it be nice then, to be able to see when and how it operates between me, you and us, as we are here togeth- er, now, sharing? It wouldn’t, I guess… be nice, I mean. This workshop deals with “monstrous” within cooperation. It is organised as an online “comic book” storyline including bits of co-writing, bits of collective performance and a bit of discussion. The workshop begins with stories of hypoc- risies, inadequacies and unease experienced within orga- nizational settings and proceeds through the monstrous altering of those narratives. The characters of Vagina Den- tata, Ass-Theth, M/Outhor, Zombie, Cannibal, Bug are in- troduced into the plot. These monstrous roles are based on myths, pieces of fiction and academic writing from the field of organizational theory. They either represent the monstrous existing within organizational structures or the monstrous that is/was historically cast away from the so- cial organizations as unsuitable, unproductive or unman- ageable. The set of writing sessions opens up into a per- formative presentation/collective reading and finally into a discussion between monstrous positions and participants.

Karolina Kucia (she/her) is a visual artist with a back- ground in sculpture and intermedia as well as in perfor- mance studies in process of doctoral studies in TUTKE, Teak. She develops organizational scores based on con- cepts of parasite, monster and slip in context of precariza- tion of labor in post-neoliberal capitalism and current form of art institutions. Her research project is Monstrous Agencies – models and tools for redefining cooperation in the production of art.

Session 19: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Apostrophe Plural

• Julia Calver, PhD researcher, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

This presentation investigates how the experimental re-distribution of apostrophes in the sentence in English disrupts the allocation of grammatical agency. I under- stand the internal reading voice, which sounds words si- lently, as a performer. This performer, I suggest, has the capacity to hold the projective and retroactive movement of syntactical reorganisation that the mis-placed apostro- phe intonates. Following David Bohm’s experimental mor- phology of movement and flowing action (‘The Rheomode’ in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980) through close read- ing and live vocalisation, I articulate how an experimental morphology moves a reader. Exploring the potential of the homophonic blurring of possessives and plurals (in their designation by the ending ‘s’) I examine how it is pos- sible to hold conflicting resolutions, to stand in two plac- es, to allow for the irresolution of the sentence as a form of thought. I ask how formal linguistic experimentation, which draws on experimental literature and poetry, opens to the writing of research. How it can hold a space for what is sounded, for the productive hesitancies provoked by an altered grammar, for attunement to a perceptible internali- ty of performative vocalisation.

Julia Calver is an artist and writer working with exper- imental linguistic morphologies. She is undertaking a practice-based PhD at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). Recent publications include works in On Care (MA BIBLIO- THÈQUE) and Inscription: The Journal of Material Text (with The Roland Barthes Reading Group). She has performed internationally, including Galleri Box, Gothenburg, and NL- HSpace, Copenhagen, and co-organises the peer-led Writ- ing for Practice Forum (Goldsmiths and SHU).

Performative Writing: Manifesto as Futuristic Speech Act

• Andrea Liu, Goldsmiths WAL

Manifestos are texts singularly invested in doing things with words; they are interventions. An intervention is predicated on action, interjection into a situation, imme- diate reconfiguration of relationships, as opposed to ‘rep- resentation.’ In his book Poetry of the Revolution; Marx, Manifestos, and the Avante Garde, Harvard Theatre & Comparative Literature Professor Martin Puchner describes the manifesto as a “futuristic speech act.” He draws on J. L. Austin’s “speech act theory,” or speech that surpass- es the realm of mere representation or abstraction, and actually executes an action in real life. Puchner argues that the manifesto is directed at an audience member that does not yet exist—the manifesto is a “speech act” which must performatively instanciate a future social condition in which the person for whom the manifesto was written will exist. One of Puchner’s most ingenious claims is that a manifesto is not merely superstructure, but it is also the base. In Marx’s terms, the base is the actual means of pro- duction whereas the superstructure is merely the cultur- al production superimposed on top. For him, a manifesto is not merely a description of a revolution, it views itself as in instrument of that revolution. This talk looks at the performative operation of manifestos, including The Glitch Moment(um) (Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) by Dutch visual artist Rosa Menkman. Glitch art is a movement that coalesced in the mid-2000‘s at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, rejecting the impeccable cleanliness of digital art and design. Instead it embraces the corruption or messy perversion of technological progress through short circuits or glitches. Menkman is almost evangelist in her advocacy of glitch art’s critical subversive potential. This talk looks at the performative operations of her manifesto and how she conflates modernist discourses of ‘newness’ with postmodernist discourses of ‘the death of the author’ in her advocacy for glitch art.

Andrea Liu is a New York/Berlin-based visual art /per- formance critic, & artist. She has given talks at Centre for Postdigital Cultures (UK), Royal Central School of Drama and Speech (UK), London Conference in Critical Thought, Society for Artistic Research Conference (University of Plymouth, UK), Graduate Centre for Europe (UK), Yale University Whitney Humanities Center, Jan Van Eyck Academie Alumni Conference, Sorbonne V.A.L.E. (Voix An- glophone Littérature et Esthétique), Geffen Museum (Los Angeles Printed Matter Contemporary Artist Books Con- ference), College Art Association, NYU Performance Stud- ies Conference (Affect Factory), MASS MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Massachusetts), Black Mountain Col- lege Museum & Arts Center, CUNY Graduate Center. She received her undergraduate education from Yale University & was curator of Counterhegemony: Art in a Social Context.

Musing Memory / Diffractive Writing. Or how to get rid of “embarrassing graphic markers.”

• Dr. Ilse Van Rijn, THIRD/ DAS Graduate School Amsterdam

This talk is grounded in my collaboration as a writer with visual artist and photographer Martine Stig. Starting from our shared interests in the relations between memory and imagination in a digitized world, we send each other snip- pets of our work reacting on each other’s material. This open process, in which writing works with and along the images in a non-hierarchical way, will result in (a) work(s) to be presented in September / October 2021. Delving into my experiences of the process, this paper aims to pres- ent the notion of diffractive writing I developed over the course of the months with Stig. It builds on Karen Barad’s understanding of diffraction / diffractive reading, and her understanding of the notion of the performative as intra-action. I will investigate what it means to be a ‘sen- tence-thinker’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha) and to actively engage with dis/orienting, haunting times and forms and/as matter. How can encounters between different entities and phenomena, and traditionally separate categories such as photography and writing, between matter and meaning, but also between makers ‘cut together/apart’ like Stig and I be translated? How to present writing that stresses its transversality, its movement (Manning) and processual becoming? I am wondering what forms text does and can take. And to what effects? Delving into materialist feminist readings of the relationships between text and ‘the world’, the discursive and the material, I aim to offer insights into what I perceive as the ‘telling flesh’ (Kirby) of contempo- rary writerly-artistic projects. Situating my work on the crossroads of theoretical study and practice, I will present experimental writing as a form of resistance, a means to subvert and transform a still reigning patriarchal dis- course ‘from within’ (Cixous, Kaiser).

Ilse van Rijn is a writer and art historian. She research- es the relations between image and language, practice and theory, nature and culture. She received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (The Artist’s Text as Work of Art, 2017). Her current research concentrates on materi- alist feminist affinities with(in) contemporary image/lan- guage practices, writing and/in memory work, and writing through orality.

Session 20: Dis(guised) Writing

Saturday 28 August, 9:30–10:30

Wandering Writings – Curative Thinking, and Performing with Hysteria

• Johanna Braun, Lecturer, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
• Elke Krasny, Professor of Arts and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

We speculatively, and generatively, propose that artistic research can learn from historically (dis)guised writing practices performed by so-called hysterics. The disrup- tive potential of hysteria, especially within the performing arts, is well-known and studied by scholars with an interest in feminist, queer, and decolonial epistemologies. The disruptive, but also curative, that is healing, potential is un- derstood in its affective and epistemic, yet less so, in its po- litical dimensions. Per Freud, his case studies gave rise to the so-called talking cure––which is attributed to Anna O., today identified as the well-known Jewish feminist activist and social work pioneer Bertha Pappenheim; for the writ- ing cure, and its method of free association, credit is given to Freud’s patient Elisabeth von R., identified as Illona Weiss. But what about the hysterical wanderings, per hys- tera, the wandering uterus, unlocking not only the talking cure, but also the writing cure? Has patriarchal epistemol- ogy normalized, and co-opted, the wandering knowledges of hysteria? This contribution aims to intensify the poten- tial, and performative impacts, of wandering writings in artistic research. Braun’s and Krasny’s performative writ- ing lecture draws on these historical legacies of free asso- ciation and epistemic disruption to reformulate them un- der current conditions of neoliberal knowledge extraction and new forms of knowledge colonization. Wanderings are transgressive. Wandering writings are challenging disci- plinary boundaries that have started to re-discipline aca- demic writing in artistic research, in particular in writ- ing, that is fixing, noting down, recording, live events, and ephemeral performance arts. This performative writing lecture will perform live-writing as the two presenters will perform live-writing instead of speaking. A digital setting will invite the listeners/audience to partake in this perfor- mative live-writing.

Dr. Johanna Braun is an artist-researcher, and just con- cluded her postdoc project The Hysteric as Conceptual Ope- rator FWF: [J 4164-G24], which was situated at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Vienna (2018– 2020). Her academic and artistic research focuses on (new) hysteria, disability, and performance studies. Most recently she published the volumes Performing Hysteria (Leuven UP, 2020) and Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Elke Krasny, PhD, is a cultural theorist, educator, and curator. She is a Professor of Arts and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her academic, and political, interests include feminist epistemologies, environmental and social justice, care ethics, social reproduction theory, and remembrance politics in art-making, architecture, and urbanism. Krasny contributed to the volumes Performing Hysteria (Leuven UP, 2020) and Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), introducing the term “hysterical studies” to describe radical disruption within the field of hysteria studies. e.krasny@akbild.ac.at

Hosting the first person

• Laura Gonzalez, Athenaeum Research Fellow, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

I am an intimate durational performance maker. This means that I perform to a restricted number of audience members – often only one in turn – and time itself is a ma- terial of the encounter. My works are are based on Sig- mund Freud’s written case histories of hysterical patients. In order to translate the work from text into performance, I created a method I call gHosting, in which I host the ghost of the patient in my own body. First, I read Freud’s writing with attention, carefully. On my second re-read, I re-write by hand the words I hear from the patient in the first person, erasing the voice of the doctor. I then record a reading of this new case history in my own voice and, instead of rehearsing the performance, I play it back to myself repeatedly, over several weeks. When I perform, I remember, rather than recite, what I hear, in the way the patients might have remembered occurrences or incidents when they told them to Freud. Thus, every one-to-one performance is different, an encounter created with the specific audience member in the room. My translation from case history to performance omits the doctor’s voice, and switches the patient’s words from third to first person – a powerful act of disguised writ- ing. For this performative lecture, I will create a ficto-criti- cal text, using poetic and / mimetic strategies to stage the oretical questions, through merging the voices of classic hysteric patients with the writing of psychoanalysis and my own experience of performing the work. Ficto-criticism is a form of resistance, as well as a way to make and to critique. This work will raise questions about the historical and con- temporary medicalisation of hysteria and the role of the hysteric in resistance and revolt.

Laura González’s work falls between medical human- ities, psychoanalysis, performance and Eastern thought, and investigates knowledge production and the body of the hysteric. She has published books on madness, seduc- tion, intersemiotic translation and performance and is cur- rently writing one on hysteria using a folding method with her collaborator Eleanor Bowen. She is also translating Freud’s case histories into intimate works and exploring the dramaturgical potential of a breath practice.

Session 22: Techno-Writing

Saturday 28 August, 13:00–14:00

Brain Dérive & Detournement. A neuro- philosophical situated GPT-2 writing game

• Margarete Jahrman, Prof. in the artistic research PhD program of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
• Charlotta Ruth, choreographer and researcher, PhD candidate Artistic research University of Applied arts Vienna
• Georg Luif, Technical Support

With this game performance, we aim to introduce a new form of technological writing in artistic research. We apply the technical settings of the actual Status Quo of Artificial intelligence in writing, generative neural network models. We use a certain “ludic method”, a concept developed with- in the Ludic Society project. We discuss pre-trained trans- formers as autoregressive writing styles, connect Deep Learning, automatic writing and choreography. As the de- parture for our proposed technological ‘détournement’ we use the contextual setting of a philosophy reading and ex- plore how we can feel rather than understand the text. The concept of Dérive, deliberated from Debord’s notion and interpreted into Alice Becker-Hos playful interpretation, is approached through philosophy of technology, artistic re- search and neuroscience. What happens to the notion of activistic play when technology is choreographing, writ- ing and analyzing our moves in the game? Equipped with a brain- computer-interface, we invite online audiences in a LIVE ONLINE writing session. Focusing on technology bias we approach reading as a performative act situating the philosophical content in practice and approaching audi- ences as an oracle-intelligence. In this way the setting, the game-mechanics and the audience activities acknowledge the session itself as an assemblage, subversively perform- ing (doing), underlining and showing without telling what is at stake. Here we build on the artistic research project Neuromatic Game Arts/ art games: critical play with neuroin- terfaces (https://neuromatic.uni-ak.ac.at). At the end of the game loop, a second new text is generated. The words and concepts of the attendees have been algorithmically fed into a Generative Pretrained Transformer in order to generate endless versions of it. into the loop! The artistic research question concerns the generation of ethical and po- litical questions concerning the measurement of the self.

Margarete Jahrmann, is an artist, researcher and game designer. She is Univ.-Prof. in the artistic research PhD program of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and leads since 2020 the Austrian Science Fund FWF research project Neuromatic Game Art: Critical Play with Neuro- interfaces. As professor Game Design at Zurich Universi- ty of Arts she developed a focus on Game Art and Neuro- Epistemology. exhibitions: CIVA Contemporary Immersive Arts 2021, Parallel Vienna 2020, Amaze Playful media 2018.

George Luif is a game developer and researcher, who lives and works in Vienna., Austria. Completed studies in Digital Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Inter- active Media/Games at the University of Southern Califor- nia. Artistically researches the convergences of art, games and technology.

Charlotta Ruth (S/A) plays with time and perception in- side choreography, participatory art and arts based re- search. The last years her main topic of investigation has been performative aspects of communication, question- ing forms of societal participation and what happens to “liveness” in our updated environment of interfaced reality. Ruth is approaching artistic research with a media independent but site and context-specific approach ranging be- tween stage, gallery, public space, institutional in-between spaces and online.

Writing is not the last word: reflections on an iterative creative research project

• Michael Murphy, Professor, Media Arts, University of Montana
• Róisín O’gorman, lecturer in Department of Theatre at University College Cork

Writing, as it moves into and through collaborative re- search and the construction of artwork is, in our experi- ence, a fracturing process, a violence of somatic presence/ absence that allows for correspondences between intimate space and distance, that recognizes and honors the geo- graphical displacement and the attempted collision of digi- tal technology and touch. We work, as collaborators, at the intersection of digital and somatic ways of knowing/access- ing/presenting. Our work contains strands developed in shared spaces and apart, between Ireland and the U.S.A.— with distance sharing and re-purposing of material and the evolving ideation that has lead to a freedom from and per- haps destabilization of meaning in a traditionally academ- ic sense. We trace the connections across specific histories, which are ongoing, where bodies and lives are disappeared by apparatuses of oppression, colonial legacies, and the ex- tractive regimes of consumption and climate destruction. Strands of work search for their helical being-ness, look- ing to attach themselves to other meaningful material. We consider the ways writing moves us towards or away from each other, the other. We consider the ways words screen us and yet might offer a bridge between worlds; the way images replace words and screens disrupt the normative. We write towards touch and away from it. Touch ablates the tensions, /melts the distances. We are out of touch. So, we write. We also draw, talk, film, record and move. We po- sition writing within a tapestry of interweaving practices, allowing writing itself to have some companionship, some kinship. Easing the burden on writing to deliver, contain, and maintain knowledge paradigms, perhaps enables un- derstanding of knowledging as wrighting; that is, at least some of the time, creating knowing is a place of play, craft, and pleasure, even as we confront the devastating crises of the world writ large.

Michael R. Murphy came to academia after a career as an actor and director in theatre, film and television, both in New York City and Los Angeles. His areas of teaching in- clude directing, acting, and interactive media performance and design. His work covers a range of areas, including filmmaking, theatre, opera, video design and performance installation work.

Dr. Róisín O’Gorman lectures in Department of Theatre at University College Cork. Her current research exam- ines performance as an interdisciplinary epistemology. Her work articulates the joint space between creative arts practice and traditional scholarship interweaving practice as a Somatic Movement Educator along with creative arts practice and traditional scholarship. This work results in arts-based research projects, essays in international jour- nals, book chapters and video essays which develop con- ceptual knowledge and integrate those concepts through the varied form.

Session 23: Forms of Writing (with No Hands)

Saturday 28 August, 13:00-14:30

Having to write, or say, anything at all

• Lin Snelling, Professor at the University of Alberta /Dancer
• Thea Patterson, Choreographer, Performer, Dramaturg PhD student University of Alberta Performance Studies

As dance artists what is this writing we do? What are these marks in space we make? While writing offers the possibil- ity of permanence, of (supposed) archival stability, at the same time, dance’s very ontology is traditionally marked by its disappearing nature, it’s resistance to sitting still. There are arguments to be made as to what this ontolo- gy offers in terms of resistance to certain hegemonies of visibility (Phalen 1996), and perhaps also what it neglects in terms of a certain melancholic notion the disappearing now (Lepecki 2005). This tension between the ephemer- al written asks how we can think with the dancing body as a site of research where knowledge is generated in uncon- ventional forms not easily taken up with the words. Words will surely fail, (as much as succeed), just as dancing will also both fail and succeed (whatever this might mean at the end of the day), and yet / words or writing are always also there. It is with this continued tethering to the place of writing or the writing of place in both their practices that Canadian dance artists Thea Patterson and Lin Snelling ask the questions: what can writing teach us about dance?

And what can dancing teach us about writing? Conceived as a lecture performance this work unfolds as a scored im- provisation where Snelling and Patterson source from con- versations and written correspondence over the period of the pandemic about their relationship to dance dramatur- gy, improvisation and dance pedagogy. In this work they speak directly to each other, interrupting and querying each other as they share their thoughts and their written letters about dancing; and sometimes dancing their way out of having to write, or say, anything at all.

Lin Snelling’s performance, writing and teaching is based in the qualities that improvisation can offer as it applies to dance, theatre, visual art and somatic practice. As Profes- sor at the University of Alberta she is presently teaching dance, experiential anatomy and composition and is Coor- dinator of the MFA in Theatre Practice program ‘Rewrit- ing Distance’, her on-going research collaboration with Belgian dance dramaturg Guy Cools continues. www.re- writingdistance.com

Thea Patterson (BFA, MA, PhD Student) is a Montreal-based choreographer, performer, and dramaturg. Her re- search investigates the potential of the dancing body as the site of embodied theoretical discourse. Here, dance prac- tice does not demonstrate an idea, nor is the idea danced, rather the two converse/converge in the entanglement of something between, something that “lives betwixt and be- tween theory and theatricality, paradigms and practices, critical reflection and creative accomplishment” (Conquer- good). Thinking, as expressed through the dancing body, moves the theory from body into the world.

Nibbling Wormholes

• Emilie Gallier, choreographer and Dr. affiliated with DAS Research (Amsterdam) and the Centre for dance research (Coventry University)

With this presentation I expose wormholes in my prac- tice-as-research PhD Reading in Performance (2021). These wormholes demonstrate my polyphonic approach for this dissertation balancing on an edge between academic meth- odologies and a more panoramic and choral approach that dance requires. Some wormholes were carved through my practices as dance artist, as spectator, and as writer who uses words, signs, drawings, collages, layout, edible and non-edible papers. Some wormholes were and are still nibbled by readers who write through the act of reading. Building upon Roland Barthes’s thinking (in ‘S/Z’, 1974) I work with the entanglement of texts and readers conjuring worlds. The wormholes in my dissertation are also threads inviting readers to weave the thinking time and time again. What they produce is a reading, which is also a dance, iter- ative, more or less than linear, with jumps and syncopation.

This dance, delicate gesture, might be like turning pages and nibbling through piled papers in order to perceive the unwritten which thrives in the written. This gesture leads us to sense our implication with the texts and with the plu- rality of others in them. One of my questions in Reading in Performance is: how are documents active in performance? My writing chews related questions: how does the writing characterize content rather than explicate? How is my dis- sertation in action, offering itself as a text to be read and transmuted to the next body to be nibbled upon. One of my peers in Amsterdam, Jennifer Lacey, wrote about my research: ‘texts tread lightly and trippingly through the world as through the bowels: ingestion, digestion, sublima- tion’ (2021). In my presentation Nibbling wormholes, I invite attenders for an encounter with texts, creaking documents, scores, jokes, poems, characters and ghosts, for a dance that has never been danced.

Emilie Gallier is a choreographer researcher based in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Dance Research (Coventry) with the support of THIRD at DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), in which she developed the idea and practice of reading in and as performance (Rea- ding in Performance 2021, http://post-cie.com/texts.php).

Her engagement with artistic research as a researcher, peer, tutor, bookworm and spectator, shapes her attention and experience with forms of writing and publishing.

Words That We Feel: Work That Resides in Our Bodies

• Allyson Packer, Lecturer at the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design

This paper explores the way writing is used as a tool to activate a viewer’s embodied experience. Words, especial- ly when used in the capacity of a performance score or im- perative text directed at the viewer, have the capacity to elicit a precise somatic awareness: When Bruce Nauman describes “tension in the muscles, pain where the bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under the pressure” (1), or gerlach en koop state “Instantly enveloped by wa- ter, the surface closed above my head” (2), we feel it. The artists’ words in these examples, both part of text-based artworks, become a vehicle to deliver a distinctly physical experience. The artwork itself resides in our bodies. At a time when our daily experiences are increasingly taking place in virtual spaces, there is an attendant cultural myth that our bodies are quickly becoming an irrelevant factor in interpreting our relationships to that material world. This paper interrogates that myth by exploring writing’s capacity to reach across the physical distance that virtual- ity creates and engage us in intimate shared experiences. It will cover both examples from the author’s own artwork, as well as contemporary and historical examples from oth- er artists. Accordingly, the paper will be delivered as a lecture- performance, that, instead of creating a passive view- ing experience, will use text and performative strategies to evoke the audience’s embodied responses. As we become more removed than ever before from the traditional sites of exhibition and participation, both author and audience will examine how writing may be used to deliver a physical immediacy that is missing in our current reality.

1. Body Pressure (1974) by Bruce Nauman
2. Instantly enveloped by water, the surface closed above my head, I understood how my body made the sea level rise (2017) by the collective gerlach en koop

Allyson Packer is an artist and educator whose work in- vestigates what embodied experience can articulate at a time when it is increasingly less common to make physical contact with the people, spaces, and institutions that im- pact us the most. She has exhibited at Nahmad Projects in London and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, among oth- er venues. She is represented by Birds + Richard in Berlin and lives in Dallas, Texas, where she teaches at the University of North Texas.

Session 24: Dis(guised) Writing

Reading and writing at the same time – translation as performance and performance as translation

• Pablo Alvez Artinprocess, Performance artist and Phd student

We explain how the interaction between a book (which in- spires my performances) and my performance art (which leads me to re-read the book) accounts for topological transformations of its text which then are sketched out in writing. This implies I am re-writing the book. Concrete- ly, the presentation describes a performative experiment I developed under the curation of Unspecified Involvements, which defines itself as “a travelling space to share writing practices (experimental / partial / fragile / unstable) through reading / performing in an informal setting”. We show how this experiment provided me with keys to write my thesis differently: (1) to use the reading of alternative translations of the original book (from French to Portu- guese and to English) to perform the text, and to realise the text is performing, by exposing the multiple mean- ings those translations actually help unfold; (2) to redirect this “caleidoscopisation” of meanings to my own process of writing, with all its implications in graphic terms (this will be explained and exemplified during the conference); (3) to expose in our way of writing (our own writing, and to some extent too our re-writing of the original book) the distinction between “text as received” and “text as processed”, including, again, how this is mirrored also in terms of the graphical space occupied by quoting the text and looking critically into it; and (4) to show how performance art plays a central role in this process of re-writing. These choices are political: by exposing them, we are showing awareness of how a doctoral research in the arts risks going beyond questioning the artistic practice to instead put it in question. As a reaction to that transgression, we show how the subject-object direction can be inverted or smudged, with advantages to both academic and artistic practice and respecting their integrity.

Pablo Alvez Artinprocess is a professionalised perfor- mance artist and holding a phd in poverty economics (Univ. de Évora), I am currently conducting a doctoral research supervised by Laura Cull (Univ. of the Arts of Amsterdam) and Kati Köttger (Univ.of Amsterdam) on how ethics can empower aesthetics. As a performance artist I received training from e.g. Steven Cohen, Rocio Boliver and Dirty Martini, among others. My latest performance was award- ed by Gulbenkian Foundation and received production support by Pompidou Brussels.