By thingness i refer to the human interconnectedness with non-human substance in a symbiotic and an evolutionary sense. What is intrinsically making the flesh of my body and is non-human, the colonies of bacteria in my guts are non-human. Where does the food i eat end and my body begin? Thingness in this sense constitutes me.
At the same time thingness belongs to the liminal spaces of my body-system. In the sense that I am inextricably dependent to things that allow me not only to survive but also to evolve and grow in many ways (my house, the city, infrastructure and so on).
The technology that i grew up with makes me, in terms of behavioural patterns, as much as it was made by other humans before me.
How would we be sharing this encounter without the devices we are operating?
How would my knowledge be different if i had no access to the internet?
As two main focus points we decided to take footwear and smartphones as the main representative of thingness in this project.
Smartphones
In this video Matteo explains how the sound score is created by himself, the program and the Telegram bot.
Also in this session we decided that to do a streaming for a public at home is beneficial to our project because of the fact that we had incorporated smartphones as cameras in our project, and also communication platform such as telegram to create the soundscape.
Therefore people will be invited to see our presentation through VIMEO streaming and at the same time to interact with us via telegram (chat) and therefore have an impact onto the creation of the sound live in the performance space. The interaction that we will ask them is that of sending our Telegram bot pictures of their shoes, in their own environment.
this video is a compilation of movements in relation to the smartphone, recording the action as a prosthesis of the moving bodies. the smartphone is connected to an extended selfie-stick that is either connected to my waist or to other things that have been assembled to allow the phone to move autonomously. see photos here.
the last fragment of the video is from a rehearsal to which our mentor Pedro has joined us remotely from Amsterdam. to work with him through smartphones has been instrumental for us to develop strategies to invite an audience via streaming.
Footwear
is a device that functions as the interface between our bodies and our direct surroundings. We wear it to protect our feet and follow our daily trails. As we walk, run, and dance it alters our balance, posture, muscle activity and impact force to the ground. Footwear makes our bodies as much as we make it. We wear sandals to air our feet after a long winter or Wellington boots to jump into puddles, but whatever shoes we wear, they not only fulfil a function, they also represent the things we do, or want to do. They are a status symbol of our quotidian relationship to our bodies and our environment.Shoes are companions to our lives and they behold the stories of the many actants in the complex system of modern capitalism as they are “offbeat proxy for globalisation”[2], before they start marking our pathways and our personal stories.
Shoes also became the main entry points for addressing audience participation in the frame of the final presentation and in the context of the Pandemic. (more in the section participatory art)
Due to the impossibility of interacting directly with attendants we decided to use their shoes as a synecdoche, meaning the part representing the whole. After sharing this idea with Janez Jansa he introduced us to the concept of interpassivity,(more here).
Footwear carries historical and cultural references that activate our imagination, especially in relation to the human body.
A sabot is a clog from France or surrounding countries such as The Netherlands, Belgium or Italy.
Sabots were considered a work shoe associated with the lower classes in the 16th to 19th centuries. During this period, the years of the Industrial Revolution, the word sabotage gained currency. An alleged etymology describes the actions of disgruntled workers who wilfully damaged workplace machinery by throwing their sabots into the works.
The Iraqui journalist who threw a shoe at George W. Bush
"This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!"
The function of a thing is not what the thing is, but it is what the thing is in relation to.
We live in a world that is only made of relationships.
- how does it work?
- what works with it?
- what are its relationships?
- how does it interact?
- how does it learn?
- how does it think?
Log-book session 6 - 24.3.2021 - Michela (studio 8)
Inspiration before session:
From “Identifying touch points in British and Chinese women’s art in the twenty-first century” by Virginia Yquing Yang.
‘Semiotic methods offered me the analytical tools for taking the image apart and tracing how a broader system of meaning could be established. Peirce’s semiosis process involves a triadic relationship between a SIGN, a SEMIOTIC OBJECT and an INTERPRETANT, which offers a rich potential for an analysis purpose.
A SIGN (or Representamen) indicates in the broadest possible sense of “represents”
A SEMIOTIC OBJECT is a subject-matter of a SIGN.
INTERPRETANT can be anything discutable or thinkable, it is the effect of a sign on someone who reads or comprehends it.
BASED OF PEIRCE’S SIGN-THEORY, STRATEGY OF ANALYSIS:
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DESCRIPTION: utilising an innocent eye for observation without being concerned with its socially and culturally coded meanings, simply perceptions of the artwork.
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COMPOSITION: looking at the work as a whole but then breaking it down into detailed components.
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INTERPRETATION: as the method that combines the artist’s experience and interpreter’s perspective for the purpose of opening up possibilities to read and make meaning of the artwork.
To further develop the interpretation of the work, the following sub-steps are considered:
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ARCHITEXT: the cluster to which the artwork belongs, for example, genre, discipline or movement. (installation)
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PARATEXT: the material supplied by the artist, for example the title of the artwork.
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PRETEXT: historical and original background of the artwork.
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ANTETEXT: the influence of previous work.
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METATEXT: discussions and reviews of the artwork.
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HYPERTEXT: the artwork in relation to other artwork (lead to touchpoint).
Semiotics is a discipline, in which culture, society and natural phenomena are explored as signs. The fundamental question in semiotics is how meanings are formed. Semiotic research approaches signs as existing in various forms: pictures, words, letters, objects, natural objects, gestures, phenomena and actions.