Ethical Gaming: ‘The Soul Station’ at Halle am Berghain, Berlin Art Link

 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: ‘THE SOUL STATION,’ 2024, installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Foto: Alwin Lay

Staged within an amphitheatre constructed inside the former power plant of Halle am Berghain, ‘The Soul Station’—a monumental immersive installation by Berlin-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley—centres around a cockpit made of a twin reclining seat fitted with a single sizeable controller. “Leaders,” who voluntarily take up the controller, face a large round screen, a portal into a labyrinthine game-space. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, ‘The Soul Station’ debuts Brathwaite-Shirley’s newest video game, unfolding over two parts: the first episode, ‘You Can’t Hide Anything,’ was launched on July 12th and the second, ‘Are You Soulless, Too?’ is scheduled to go live on September 12th. Set in the aftermath of a revolution, the main action in ‘You Can’t Hide Anything’ occurs inside a temple dedicated to “Bodyswappers.” Gamers are challenged to find and engage with six people inhabiting this graphically dense and detailed parallel universe, and then save them by choosing from a restricted set of conversational prompts, all within 11 minutes. A testament to the graphic limitations of the PS2 console (released 2000), gamers steer their way through throngs of polygon characters, past curious objects, between floating text and across vibrant textures. 

Read at Berlin Art Link

Critical Radio, Springerin 1/2024

“Hideakie Gushiken, documenta fifteen, 2022.” foto: Sumugan Sivanesan

“Critical Radio: Community Building and Solidarity in a Low-Bandwidth Medium” published in Springerin 1/2024, "ArtGPT." Excerpts below:
 

At an assembly held during documenta fifteen, it was suggested that net radio is a kind of low bandwidth activism taking up digital space in a largely privatized and commercialized World Wide Web. While this may be so, fugitive radio claims that the critical front is not at public facing websites, rather “critical radio”1 emerges in the kinds of organizing, skill sharing and community building that occurs alongside the production of content. Hack-labs and live broadcast happenings facilitate sharing, co-learning and generate enthusiasm for alternative networked-sociabilities. While such gatherings are often premised on pursuing free and open (source) culture and promoting digital commons, it is arguably conviviality that shapes the micro-politics of experimental radio activity. 

 … 

“Make friends not art” was a phrase that memed during the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa’s takeover of documenta fifteen (2022), also known as “lumbung one,” valorizing of the social aspects of art-making over its commodified objects. Friendship was thus politicized as it determined the communities, practices and issues leveraged through infrastructural art power. This was notable as evidence of antisemitism alongside racist and transphobic attacks rocked the event, leading to censorship, withdrawals and the resignation of Documenta’s Director General Sabine Schormann. Nevertheless, solidarities resolved among those remaining and initiatives, such as lumbung radio, are ongoing. Organizations have since proposed to “learn from lumbung,” a reference to an Indonesian community rice barn, emphasizing the pooling and redistribution resources among inter-local networks and collective planning. I think it would also be wise to learn from the Humboldt Forum.

 …

When I moved to Berlin in 2017, curators I met sought to politicize their practices. Now some admit to being strategically silent, contributing to a climate of self-censorship and antagonism that recalls East Germany’s Stasi era or McCarthyism in the United States. As spaces holding multiple perspectives are dramatically reduced, what are the alternative platforms for critical debate?

Reparative Architecture: Anujah Fernando’s ‘Kantstraße 104a’, Berlin Art Link

Anujah Fernando: ‘Kantstraße 104a: an archive survey (detail),’ 2023, installation view at Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Villa Oppenheim. Photo by Allan Laurent

 

இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does It Matter Now If I Come or Go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a (2023) is a docu-fiction film and visual arts installation, currently on view at Villa Oppenheim, Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Made by Berlin-based cultural scholar, curator and filmmaker Anujah Fernando, the film and installation elaborate on archival research, interviews and onsite documentation of Pension Kant. This hostel in West Berlin housed asylum seekers escaping the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and currently hosts migrants fleeing the war in Ukraine.

Read at Berlin Art Link.

“Karaoke Theory/Karaoke Therapy”, Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 109, 2023

Cartoon by Olav Westphalen (2021) from the X-disciplinary Congress on Artistic Research and Related Matters, Vilnius Academy of Arts, October 14-17th, 2021.

 

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis: The Uses and Abuses of Artistic Research in Post-Disciplinary Academia, No. 109, 2023.

Editors of this issue: Aldis Gedutis, Vytautas Michelkevičius

https://aaav.vda.lt/journal/issue/view/aaav109

This Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis (AAAV) issue brings together selected papers presented during the congress. Some of the articles are written by scholars and some by artist-researchers from all around the world. Aldis Gedutis and Vytautas Michelkevičius lay the ground for artistic research and discuss the labyrinth of inter-, trans- and other prefixes in arts and sciences as well as justify the trans-epistemic community as the caretaker of artistic research. John Hillman claims the practice is a symptom of research, while David Maroto presents “fictocritical” writing as a lifesaving boat for artists who want to seamlessly merge their fiction writing skills with (critical) theories. Magda Stanová guides us to artistic thinking in scientific research, while Greg Bruce flies us over the Atlantic Ocean and presents outlines of the local (Canadian and French-speaking world) concept of artistic research – research
-creation. Bettina Minder and Pablo Müller return us back to earth in order to see how artistic research works in doctoral programs and courses in Switzerland. Andrew J. Hauner helps us witness an experimentally written research paper and question the existing formats of research outcomes. Raivo Kelomees proposes and defends a challenging hypothesis about the animistic relationship between a viewer and an artwork, whereas Sumugan Sivanesan allows us to swing and linger between karaoke theory and therapy. Finally, Christiane Keus proclaims the present condition as Postresearch!

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Karaoke Theory/Karaoke Therapy

This article, an outcome of practice-based artistic research, concerns singing as a therapeutic performance and conveyor of knowledge. It arises from my project fugitive radio, which responds to the uptake of radio in contemporary art by pursuing experimental modes of “performance-radio.” Following a voicing event in Helsinki, a colleague suggested that singing had been “somehow civilized out of us”, prompting me to investigate connections between singing, therapy, and knowledge and in relation to the global phenomenon of karaoke singing.

Read in AAAV Journal.

 

"Techno on the Radio: Constant’s Techno-Cul-de-Sac", MARCH

Techno-Cul-de-Sac worksession “alleycasting” concluding event at Studio Techno-Cul, November 25, 2022.

Constant’s recent worksession, Techno-Cul-de-Sac, co-convened by members Martino Morandi and Peter Westenberg (November 20–25, 2022), proposed a collective encounter with Brussels via an investigation of zoning, infrastructure, and technology, bringing together artists, architects, and urban researchers. I joined on the basis of my current artistic-research interest, fugitive radio, which seeks to develop collectively-realized modes of “performance-radio” using free and open-source tools. As such, I was particularly interested in zones determined by communication infrastructures: “network coverage, whether by cables or by the aether: phone lines, optical fibers, 4G, 5G, FM.” As someone engaged with interventions I was drawn to the worksession’s questions: What are possible strategies to express disagreement, temporarily or structurally in the urban space? As private property and public space melt into each other, what modes of dissent help us rethink public space and public action?
 

Read more at MARCH.

‘CTM 2022: Contact Traces’, MARCH is a journal of art & strategy

Moor Mother, CTM x Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz © Stefanie Kulisch / CTM Festival 2022.

In the context of Covid, “contact” corresponds to a contagion that is airborne and alludes to anxieties about sharing space and breathing the same air. Music also travels through air, and the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld claims that sound is a haptic sensation as changes in air pressure vibrate our eardrums. Indeed, music has long been mediatized and distributed in such a way that we are often “touched” by recorded or broadcast sounds, but there are other aspects of music performance that forge sonic cultures and aesthetics. The burgeoning philosophy of somaesthetics proposes that our bodies are an indispensable “tool of tools” and so by enhancing our bodily perceptions we may improve our quality of life. In my early attempts to write about dance, I was advised that rather than trying to “read” the performers’ movements I should attend to how they registered in my body; how did they make me feel? So while I consider how music affects me as an audience member, I am also keen to emphasize how audiences are receptors and, indeed, hosts for sounds. In particular, I was struck by the range of singing practices represented at this year’s festival. 

 Read at MARCH.

‘Rude Awakenings’ OJ Da Tamil Rapper x Bo Sedkid for Thattu Pattu

By the time you read this Wake Up will be history. The track was written and recorded in January 2022 and the video finished in March, yet it predicted the political-economic crisis that struck in April. “The Sri Lankan Spring”, some call it, recalling the peoples’ movements in Tunisia and Egypt that gave rise to the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements in 2011–12. So now the music video arrives to you late, but nevertheless timely. Having pre-processed the crises and the protests currently in play, Wake Up’s montage possesses some visionary power. Rendered with film grain, dust and scratches it emerges as already archival. Might it serve as a kind of divinatory tool? What does it reveal?

OJ Da Tamil Rapper has been something of an enigma, hiding out in the hilltops of Nuwara Eliya where he tends to a farm. Bo Sedkid, the producer alias of artist and filmmaker Muvindu Binoy, is a versatile musician, known as a beatmaker and more recently as a singer-songwriter.

Read at Thattu Pattu.