Artistic statement
Sensing a constellation aims to create a sensitive interface, to navigate a database of feminist healing decolonial hacking practices and to document their traces.goldjian is preparing a constellation of feminist, healing, decolonial, hacking practices. goldjian took seriously the proposition suggested by the authors of « de l’univers clos au monde infini », to come back on earth and look at the infinity of feminist and native tales, as ways to get out of the capitalocen/anthropocen.
This explorations involves meeting, reading, hearing, connecting dots and playing with forms of displaying this constellation.
To constellate is a practice that allows us to make sense, to align ourselves (Estela López Solís) and eventually to add stars in a sky already deprived of light (Adrienne Maree Brown, citing Martin Luther King). A constellation is an ensemble of stars. From a situated knowledge position, the stars appear visibly close for civilizations to draw links between them by creating meaningful shapes. We ask: how can contemporary technofeminism generate a constellation of hopes, solidarities, and intersectional practices in order to dance forward a desirable future?
image 6: a constellation of feminist decolonial healing hacker collective and servers
Goldjian started to prepare the project during a residency in Esc Kunst Media Labor and Mur.at, Graz, Austria. Those art center and data center are given her some technical and artistic and financial support to developp the project. Mur at is a data center who host artists in residency along with a feminist server. The server has been equiped by the sound artist Valentina Vuksic with sensors who are sonifying the electromagnietic waves of the hardware at work. This is potentially one of the soundscape that would be diffused in the installation. Over sounds would come from discussions recorded at a transhackfeminist convergence, and some recording of visionary feminist poetry (from workshops and performance in Graz).
Text and video will also be recording from this journey or connecting with a constellation of feminist, healing, decolonial content, hosted on the cloud, feminist servers.
We are going to connect those inspiring dots together, and explore different ways of navigating them.
For this residency, we would like to experiment with a sensorial dark room, with stars shaped light that hide infrared sensors.
In this set up, human movement could trigger the infra reds, acting as sensitive cursors, navigating a database of soundscapes, audio recording, videos and images and a few text files . The room would be black/dark/void of media effect by default. Projectors or speakers will be only activated by human movement. This sensible constellation will allow the public to play with sounds, texts, video and images appearing to « reveal » moments and echos of feminist healing hacking practices in the dark space.
image 1: the dark room, with infra red « stars »
Human movement and touch would trigger 3 possible types of output .
Sounds ( right on image 1, orange on image 2- coming from a serie of speakers hidden in the wall)
Videos (left side on image 1, blue on image 2 – coming from maybe 2/3 projectors)
Text (front on image 1, yellow on image 2- from a non very light projector)
The public movements will allow them to operate and « scroll » among datas, to reveal captured and reflected echoes of practices.
For Orbital Resonance, four poles of theater lights were flooded with specific rgb gels to create an infrared space.
image 3: poles of theatre light, flooded with rbg gel from Orbital Resonnance
It is also inspired by the hornyphon, a old radio developed in austria / germany, that had a hard time to be exported because of its name. As many radio or tv, a big button allow the user to navigate channels, bringing them to cross large white sounds winds in between the channels.
image 4: the hornyphon
On the same principle, the user will scroll a spectrum of channels, exploring ways to navigate this constellation of traces of feminist healing decolonial hacking practices. In between the channels or the datas: interstellar winds of white sounds and images.
image 5: sensing constellation, with human cutting infrared
Technical requirements:
Dark room – minim 4 m x 4 m
black curtain
theatre light
kinect
infra red sensors (capteur de faisceau infrarouge à deux faisceaux aactive pour 60m en plein air )
rbg gel
6 speakers
3/4 projectors (we could provide some)
a projector with the dead white pixels desease 🙂
Arduino ?
Audio cables
a multimedia computer for monitoring the effects (possible to borrow at Hexagram) ?
with – (note PureData / MaxMSP) -> Isadora : for real time manipulation of medium
– Processing:
– Arduino :
Bio and up-to-date CV of all collaborators
Margaret Jean Mather Westby is an artist and researcher currently pursuing her PhD in Humanities – Interdisciplinary Studies (Fine Arts) at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Her PhD dissertation makes a mess of dance through feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS). Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, she has been involved in dance from a young age and received professional training in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance at Interlochen Arts Academy and a BA in dance and communication arts, magna cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. At Brunel University in London, England, she completed her MA in Contemporary Performance Making. She has created and collaborated in art performances, installations, and films throughout Canada, Europe, United Kingdom, and the United States. Her own practice and research explores the hybridization of human and machine-based actions through a feminist perspective.
Goldjian is a transdisciplinary researcher, dancer and multimedia artist interested in the political, epistemic and poetic aspects of collaborative platforms and participative devices. She has a PhD in Communication and in Sociology and wrote her thesis on “The Negotiation of Contributions in Public Wikis.” This theoretical work led her to engage with the poetics of collective contributions through various forms – relational movement, dance improvisation, performances, multimedia and mixed media installation. Inspired by free culture, she mostly explores the relationships between digital material, participative devices, the public and collective action. As a techno-feminist, she also facilitates participatory process and mutual learning and likes to make visible, readable and malleable the processes of co-construction of knowledge. She introduces relational practices (toward humans and technologies) in digital arts and hacker culture, and creates intimate spaces toward collective emancipation.
Support material of current or past works (max. 10 images and/or 2 audio/video excerpts, no more than 20 MB)
images:
sensing the constellation: text,sound, video
videos
An other one, from the residency in graz, to be edited / uploaded
Audio :
to come
Notes on the artists:
This is going to be a 4rd collaboration for goldjian and Margaret, who actually met at Eastern Bloc during Diaphanous Algorithmics. Margareth then invited goldjian to take part to Orbital Resonance. They worked together in the performance white magic black magic presented at Lab phenomena and in the participatory event Cryptodance, presented during thf at studio xx.
a constellation 