Outline The written thesis is a three-tiered report on: - The project Under/Up the Stairs - How this project relates to my previous work - How Under/Up relates to theory, and work by selected artists One thread of the thesis follows the development of my current project Under/Up the Stairs. This is a project and event space in staircases and stairwells coordinated in collaboration with Noe Kidder in Brooklyn, NY. The first event was the installation of a stereo sound composition, which I recorded on my stairs in Rotterdam, and installed on Noe's staircase in Brooklyn. Underneath her staircase, several of my works on paper were displayed. The second event was a screening of Noe's short film, which she made in response to my poem Cage's Cave / Cave's Cage. Also on view were several of her poems in a small chapbook, a hand-written letter, and a poem in the form of a cut-up word game, installed in my windowsill. We had a few responses from people who want to be involved, and we invited two people ourselves as well. The idea is that the Rotterdam node will be a host venue during the graduation show, broadcasting/hosting/screening an event live. It's very much a project that develops and falls into place as I investigate and question directions and possibilities for it. Tracking these conversations and considerations with my collaborator, as well as audience, and people connected to the PZI environment, is part of the thesis. What feels right? What's next? What makes sense? Sometimes you have to do just do things to then realize later what they meant or how they fit or didn't fit. This project partly sprung from my frustration with online performance. Earlier in the year, it seemed to make sense to head in that direction, and explore how to bring online and physical performance closer together. I partly managed to do this with the project Is This On? which I coordinated last November as part of the UpStage 11:11:11 event. I've been involved in online performance projects a few times, it doesn't make me an expert, but what often bothers me is the fact that I feel some sort of emptiness or disconnectedness. Even more than with the ephemerality of live performance, capturing the moment seems impossible. What happened online, is in some ways still an extension of our mind. It didn't exist in our bodily plane, and the experience of performing as well as experiencing entered your body in a different way. How is this emptiness similar or different to live, physical performance, with an audience and response in the room? I don't always knew who was there, the process of feedback interests me. Within this thesis and the project itself, documenting the development as well as the events themselves is incredibly challenging and important. In some ways this reminds me of the concerns of the Fluxus and Conceptual Art movements in the 60s and onward. Helen Varley Jamison, the co-creator of UpStage, mentioned that you really have to be there, on the website, to watch the performance unfold. Viewing the screen capture isn't the same experience. You're not there, right in that moment. This brings me to liveness, and the liveness of the live, the raw emotion of an experience. I will expand on this topic by looking briefly at Tino Sehgal's work, and a more detailed review of my participation in a workshop he guided during Sonic Acts. Placing project in context: relating the conversational, experimental, learning by doing, process-based nature of the project, to Gregory Bateson's process to come to an ecology of mind. The exploratory, selfcorrective mechanisms in developing the project. The process of arriving, getting there, moving through thought and practice. Mostly reflecting on his Metalogues, and chapters V and VI on Epistemology and Crisis, I am going to talk about navigating around ideas, experiences, and formation of knowledge, the learning process, as the projects defines itself. In some ways it's a dialog between the gut and the mind, knowing and unknowing, how ratio can prohibit one from moving forward as well as push one forward if one pushes oneself. Repeatedly revisiting the same ideas, from various angles and with input from my source material will bring a red thread, diverging paths leading to new insights and already acquired knowledge. I will question the term nonlinearity, as in my opinion every person has their own linearity. I will get to this by way of Joel Ryan's ideas Knowing When, a lecture on how the body and brain work together to organize the performer's objective sense of time. Inspired by IC-98's Foucault's Sleep, I will relate my ideas along the format of an archipelago. By approaching Ideas as Islands, I will investigate and chart the landscape and vast waters of the brain and body. I will talk about repetition (Smith), circling around ideas, revisiting ideas as a journey (Bateson, Sehgal), as if in a boat, navigating around the island, looking at the problem from different angles. How relating sequences and devising narrative structure (Smith, Calle) foster relationships between subjects, bring an experience, new perspective, sedimentation, growth, an ecology of mind (Bateson). Through Bateson, I will focus on human pattern recognition, systems design, learning while doing, connecting mind and body. Conversation with Michael Murtaugh, March 12 Under up the stairs (Two staircases, here and in Brooklyn) http://ihoonte.hotglue.me/underupthestairs Gregory Bateson / Margaret Mead, Anthopological Joyce Wieland (from Structure of the Book). Example of re-creating a book used for our logbook. What ties things together. How to show the connections Networked Performance without an Internet Connection Frustration with online performances -- sense of loneliness afterwards. Emptiness of networks Just sitting with people that otherwise you would never meet. 1. EMPTINESS 2. CONNECTIONS Connection to the past, past forms of writing, performance, sound. Finding connections between the stairs. Transposing audio between scenes. What I like about networked performance is the live moment, (you can read about it) I like that it happens The work really lives in the people who were there. Research documentation, logging experiences of the moment. The power of the image to overpower physical presence How to make clear your perspective / frustrations with making "network art" -- position the work against this (if not exactly in opposition, but clearly making certain decisions for a reason). Sunday March 25, email exchange & Skype call with Noe Kidder Implosion. Noe's husband Mark was sick last night, and he informed Noe at the last minute that he'd rather not have people over. This is partly my imposition on their private home, by inviting people into it, and partly us not having foreseen that of course it's Mark's house too, so my imposition on Noe also becomes an imposition on him. Noe had to cancel on my friend Minda, and our mutual friend Brad, who was on his way to take photographs of the space. They were both fine with it but at the same time it was hard for Noe to let people down, and today, hard for me to realize I may have burdened Noe with a structure she didn't set out to be part of. I think what overshadows most of the pressure I seem to put on this project is well, yes, school and all the motivation and overthinking overtalking in tutorials but also I just feel so far away. Away from my collaborator. Not looking each other in the eye when we brainstorm. Not hanging out in a cafe and let things fall into place over breakfast like we used to. I think in a lot of ways I never closed off having to leave. Part of me is still there. My friendships are there. So then if not many of those people who were part of my life, come, show support, I feel like they're lost. To some extent, people showing interest or showing up was materializing (although I'm not physically there) the proof of what our interactions back then meant, how they carried on, and ultimately, what I mean. And that's a sort of narcissistic way to approach this project. I love working with Noe precisely because she unravels this in me. It makes me aware I have these tensions. Where I push things too much because I think that's what I need to do while often I need to learn to do the opposite and just let things be and develop into something they need to be, naturally. I have to resolve that so I can make work that stands on its own feet, and not on or underneath my ego. And also, the fact that we're not invested in the same way. That not working with me is more important. Which rationally, I completely understand, but it definitely turns out that emotionally I have a hard time handling this. We just talked on Skype, I just needed to hear her voice. Crying by yourself gets you nowhere. Then something happened across Noe's street, some sort of occupy movement thing, with lots of police, and she said, actually "I wish you were here," which she often says when what happens, or things she finds on the street remind her of me. People thinking of me. People not thinking of me. What do I mean? And when someone says they think of me, or miss me, do I believe them? Even when Noe just asked if I wanted to talk on Skype, after I called her cellphone, I'm hesitant to hit the green call button. What if I call her a few seconds before she's ready to talk to me? Inge, there's no such thing! I have to learn to catch that negative feedback loop before it goes downhill. I have to distract it, circumvent it, reroute it, towards something positive. People like you, Inge. And you should too. It's hard not to be somewhere. Or to be somewhere and not feel connected. It seems with me, it's never enough. I'm so anxious, but for what? If I'd really study my patterns, would I be able to change them? Can I evolve over time, by being open to chance, letting myself be guided by the random aspects in life that add to organic growth and development? My mind clearly codes messages the wrong way. I know this, but how do I loop this knowledge back as knowledge of an expanded self, to apply a recursive learning system? How do I not only learn from my thoughts and feelings getting out of hand, but prevent them from happening to begin with, and just accept situations as they are? I'd say I'm a pretty flexible person, as within my improvisational practice what I love most is that ability to adapt, to respond to the person I'm working with, to be in the moment, to be playful with my knowledge, and to discover new parts of knowledge, or rediscover what I already knew. And to let the other player guide me in this process, learn from his/her process and knowledge, and arrive at a new place together, that I wouldn't have been able to get to by myself. Their progress aids my progress. I need that instant feedback and trust to progress. I think in my non-collaborative work, not so much in my writing actually, the poems usually develop on their own, and I'm able to let them become what they need to be, I'm much less hesitant or self-doubting. But for example right now with Under/Up, a lot of it is this anxiety to do something wrong, to make the wrong decision on my own, to not do it right, to not be good enough even perhaps. It would therefore be vital for my own creative health, to take lessons from my collaborative practice, and apply them to my non-collaborative practice? I think this is also why I'm so attracted to Metalogues, because it's the process of two people figuring something out, together. And in the other texts, he does that by himself. But another part of me is also very rigid, and seems to hold on to that negative behavior. It's what I know, and even in all its viciousness, it's considered safety, a natural state that my body and mind want to keep returning to. So I might have to teach myself that viciousness isn't safety, it isn't happy, it isn't good for me. I don't have to endure the pain, I don't have to put myself in situations of conflict, or set myself up for difficult learning experiences, or hang in there when it gets tough. Sometimes it's really okay to say no. I guess the point is to learn when, to know when you can let go, and have it be a whole body experience, not just a rational decision, but a fully embodied letting go of a certain expectation, however contrived or unreasonable or indecisive or fake. The rigidity is very much formed by this idea that being tough on yourself is good for you. And by processes in childhood that I still accept as the truth about myself in adult life. The fact that kids didn't want to play with me as a child, bullied me, hit me when I stood up for myself, or ganged up on me, or wiggled me out of a friendship, was THEN. I didn't understand it then, why it happened. It made me sad, and I persevered, I did keep believing in myself and I was strong. But I also accepted it as the truth, that there's either something in me that people don't want to be around, or that I have to hide part of myself, or can't share part of myself, while at the same time struggling to let precisely that part of me come out, or that there's something in other people that treats me that way. To avoid the confrontation, while seeking it, I learned to not get too close, while at the same time yearning and seeking intimacy even more. You can't get burnt if you never start a fire. Self worth. Ego. Identity. Love. Friendship. Validation. Being hard on oneself, pleasing others. Loving the quirks in others, being so self-conscious about my own quirks. "What is important is to begin to move with that trajectory, to empathize with it, in order to move beyond it, so that the next step becomes obvious." (Bateson, MC, p xiv) What is this Under/Up? It's Noe. It's me and Noe. It's part of me in Brooklyn. It's wanting to connect people I can't be with on a daily basis, who are in the same town, because they can't meet at my house. I started decorating, "nicing up" my apartment ever since I moved in. The staircase followed soon after. I put up some posters first. Vacuumed. Threw out the trash. Then I painted half of it aquablue last Summer, added Christmas decoration in December, hung some old photos. Bought a new doormat. Under/Up is a logical next extension of this process. Making coming home more special. Making the building home. Making the building mine. Making Holland my home again. By inviting work into it by the people who inspired me to even get this far. The people I wish were here. While at the same time transposing them and myself into Noe's home, and others' homes. As long as I'm in transit, I don't have to define. That's not quite correct. In transit, I define in the moment. Whatever is defined in that moment, is right. It's not until afterwards, that I start to doubt. Or beforehand, that I hesitate in letting it be something. But if it's always right in the moment, then how come there is a negative before or after? Noe mentioned I wanted this to be too public, while she envisioned it to be more private. In the light of "Why do things always get in a muddle?" it occurs to me that our ideas of public might be different. Gregory Bateson pointed out to his daughter Cathy that someone else's tidy, is not the same as Cathy's tidy or his own tidy. Cathy responded that from her perspective of tidy, someone else's tidy might look like a muddle to her. Definitely our different meanings of the concepts private and public is also what caused last night's event to be canceled. I invited Brad because I wanted good quality documentation, as it's something I often 'forget' (but that's another story). To Noe, this might already feel too public, too official, too art world, not private enough. In Noe's idea of private viewings, ideally, Brad would contact her to come by, and as he's a photographer, he might feel inclined to document the work. So our intention of inviting people is also different. And we try to meet in the middle on most of these things, respect each other's wishes, so it's never fully what your interpretation of it is, as it's altered by the other's involvement. Moving forward. And that's exactly what happened just now. I wasn't scared to start. I finally just wrote something and realized things along the way. Maybe the whole process of not getting started is also in that fear to define? And again what comes up is how the pain of the fear, the metastasis of being stuck, is what I perceive as a normal state. I know that breaking through it will feel better but spend a lot of time preventing that from happening. And even after it happens, there's the next step, it has to move further, it's not enough, I shouldn't be doing something else already, no, immediately back into the comfort of discomfort, where I'm always not sorting things out or getting to a point. Gregory further moves into defining tidy, questioning tidy, with Cathy. He investigates what the boundaries of tidy are for her by using the example of her paint box on the shelf. More ways which either one of us calls not private or not public, than private or public. The same probably goes for absence/presence, and what I describe as being there, not being there. Even if you're thinking about groceries when talking to a friend, you're not fully there. So fully being present with someone is rare. Hiding/revealing - same thing. Even in writing this, I'm hiding, not fully explaining myself. What are the thresholds where that comfort becomes discomfort. Where does that flow begin? It's in that flow that you're happy. so you must find flow in more things. Different subject.