Mind Rain, The Journey of Accessing

2017

Art, times / spaces It is impossible to speak of art, times, and spaces without mentioning those actors who institute and inhabit them, for the concepts of this triad are thought by them and are indissociable and interconnected. As the experiences of art are not isotropic, these concepts are malleable and constitute themselves in a wide network of possibilities which can often be reconstituted. If space is concrete physical experience, it is also, and at the same time, the act or practice of place (CERTEAU, 1994), which enunciates it. In this way, experiences carry within themselves the notion of abstraction , of experience as an existential space in interaction with the world. According to this view, it follows that existential experience, in non-linear time, transforms places into spaces and / or spaces into places, and reorganizes games and positions of force (CERTEAU, 1994; SERRES, 1998), drawing mutable relationships between human beings. It is what enables the possibility of f...

Revista Trabajo Social, 2023

2012

How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The 'images' used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, cognitive and emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual originssynaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance -embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences. 13:2 Coessens | 454

Repertório, 2017

P(AR)ticipate: body of experience/body of work/body as archive and AffeXity are two AR (Augmented Reality) and Screendance works that attempt to capture, amplify and share affect and memory using AR, mobile phones and audience participation. P(AR)ticipate is an immersive, autobiographical, participatory and live installation work comprising: text, analogue hieroglyphs and gestural Screendance videos, tagged to the hieroglyphs, using the AR app Aurasma, within an interaction design. The work explores the porosity between analogue and augmented gestures, personal somatic memories and mediated experiences, of living in an apartheid and democratic South Africa. AffeXity on the other hand, is an interdisciplinary choreographic project examining affect, dance on screen and cities. AffeXity, a play on both 'affect city' and 'a-fixity'. It is a collaborative project drawing together dance, visual imagery, AR and mobile phones, that audiences use for the viewing of choreographies embedded on tags in the city of Copenhagen Denmark. The project now forms part of the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University. This paper describes the process and methodologies of capturing affective choreographies and memory on video, on analogue hieroglyphs and the processes of sharing them within interaction AR designs. It also describes the collaborative processes involved in both projects that attempt to allow audiences with mobile devices, to extrapolate hidden layers of affect and memory using networked mobile technology. These projects may shape choreographic formations that have not yet been explored and "is a specialised and evolving form-where the choreographic language is interrogated not for form or content sake, but in response to the changing stimuli and physical liberties of the technology itself." (KRIEFMAN, 2014). This consequentially liberates the choreographic content and language from more traditional vocabularies, narratives and settings, to poetic ones. Above all, the paper investigates the archiving of affect within a relational and dialogical field, of "unfolding the self into the world, whist enfolding the world within" (BRAIDOTTI, 2013). It explores how we anchor our bodies to the world (GREGG and SEIGWORTH 2010 cited in KOZEL, 2012) and how these "messy encounters become platforms for the transmission of affect (and memory) across bodies that themselves exist across layers of mediatization" (KOZEL, 2013).

2018

This research project evaluates historical and contemporary approaches to art medium and how problems of medium specificity may be re-thought through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetic materialism and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics. While coming to different conclusions about art’s critical potential, both modes of thought are informed by poststructuralist premises. Nancy’s concept of the ‘singular-plural’ is used to account for both translations and discordances between painting and other mediums such as digital printing and 3D animation. The singular-plural is relevant to the question of medium in contemporary art because it provides a critique of artistic projects that subordinate formal and sensory meaning to conceptually driven ideals beyond material features of artworks. Nancy’s materialist aesthetics revitalises the artwork’s formal characteristics as capable of rendering sensory meaning without entirely relying on pre-determined significations. This approach is contrasted with ‘socially engaged’ artistic trends of recent times that privilege a yet to be realised ideal of social re-configuration over the tangible, material characteristics of artworks. Rather than claiming to represent social or political content ‘outside’ of the sensory impact of the artwork, my practice stages juxtapositions between divergent material supports, suspending conceptual resolution, while heightening effects of difference. At the same time, in some of my works, formal relations between different media operate alongside symbolic references to typically opposed historical regimes of technological modernity through digital prints, and anti- or pre-modernity through figurative, folk-art type paintings on hessian. Both connections and incompatibilities between differing modes of production are not only explored for their formal and sensible features, but are also deployed for their signifying potential. This approach intersects with philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception of modern art as a surface of conversion between sensory, material aspects of artworks and their discursive re-inscription. In this way, formal components of the artwork generate sensory, inter-medial affects, while also activating diverse conceptual associations related to social and political events. My project contends that formal, inter-medial features of artworks may be viewed as ‘political’ through their potential to form new relations of meaning at odds with conventional or singular expectations.

ARTMargins, 2020

outside the scope and scale of our visual and narrative forms, everything that doesn't fit notions of visibility, spectacle, or event. According to Nixon, some processes move too slowly for our forms to hold them together, or take place in registers that are unobserved, such as the bodies of the poor. They may also, like radiation, overspill the temporality of our lifespans. If such slow-paced and open-ended processes elude the "tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat," 2 then how, asks Nixon, might the "long dyings" 3 of environmental catastrophe be registered in cultural and aesthetic practices that might then induce political action? We could go further. Might it not also be, as Amitav Ghosh suggests, that our artistic forms and conventions not only fall short of accounting for the crisis of climate change but also actively participate in "modes of concealment" 4 due to the momentum of their internal logics? That is, are the inherited forms of our modernity not only blind to the climate crisis (due to questions of scope and scale), but also actively preventing us from recognizing it, in what Ghosh terms "the great derangement"? Recent books by T.

Memory and Aesthetic Experience, 2020