User:Inge Hoonte/annotations

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Media: steps_to_underupthestairs.txt

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.

ANNOTATIONS

Theory Content

Gregory Bateson Steps to an ecology of mind

IC-98 Foucault's Sleep: Models for a proposal

Tino Sehgal Sehgal Masterclass

Notes on Cybernetics cybernetics

Form of the essay as book

Keith A. Smith Structure of the visual book

Portulan by Barbara Ramseier, a voyage from the mediterranean sea to the pacific ocean

Theo Ellsworth Capacity

Sophie Calle Appointment with Sigmund Freud

Emily Ward and Ian White We are behind

The Trip The Trip

Laurence Bach the Paros Dream Book

PLANNING

What I have sofar: about 700w on Bateson (intro, chapter V); 500w on Sehgal workshop; bits & pieces on Under/Up: 700w.

March 21-22 -> reread chapter V+VI Bateson, annotate

March 23-28 -> retrace development Under/Up the Stairs, add up to 1500-2000w

• emails
• notes from tutorial meetings
• memory

March 25 -> finish report Sehgal workshop -> is this just another version of Metalogues? It is a similar set up but it's multi-player. So the ego and the way you play is of more importance than in Metalogues.

March 28 -> Aim: 2000w all together. Print & draw connections, figure out how it ties together

March 29-30 -> 700w previous practice, small descriptions and how they tie in to this

April 1-8 -> pick Bateson back up and relate back and forth to project dev txt (500 -> 1000w)

April 9 -> assess, take stock

April 18-> 4000w

May 2 -> 6000w