Daniel Vincent Hansen [SE/NO] (b. 1991) is an artist from Gothenburg with a background in photography. He has studied Fine Art at the art academies in Trondheim and Oslo, and has shown his work at among others Babel Visningsrom, Fotogalleriet and Studio17.
Nature has gone estranged. Our link to it is more important than ever. Our home planet needs our care and love. This is what Ecophilia is about. And you cannot avoid it. Nature is all about your lifeworld. Where you live, how you live and how you love it.
Ecophilia reflects not only a necessity, but also a deep desire to connect with nature. But what is nature really? Except for some ecological dreamscapes?
Ecology comes from Greek Oikos, meaning home. In this age of the Anthropocene, our Oikos is constantly altered by new technologies, man-induced environmental disasters, biotechnological wonders, and blurred borders between the made and the natural.
Doomsday scenarios and environmental apocalypses have become iconic images of nature today. The same dystopias of the future lure us back to most romantic portraits of pristine landscapes – a paradise lost.
Some wonderful place we once belonged. What is that nature we so desperately worship, seek to love, protect, and save? Does it even exist?
After all, there is no universal understanding of nature. It is a cultural construct. There is no perfect love for it either. Are the many varieties of ecophilias manifesting our changing relationship of nature? Can one be too much of an ecophile?
Meta.Morf 2022 – The seventh Trondheim international biennale for art and technology – manifests a critical take on our relationship to nature. The biennale will, through conferences, exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops, critically question what it truly means to be an ecophile in the age of the Anthropocene.
Zane Cerpina / Espen Gangvik, 2022
Meta.Morf 2022 / Cinemateket Trondheim / Screenings June 17 / Curator: Jeremy Welsh
Tickets NOK 90 / 120.
An illustrated talk, screening and concert at Trondheim Cinematek to celebrate the 25th anniversary of electronic arts festival Screens, the forerunner of Meta.Morf.
The screening programme will feature old and new film/video works, including Ivar Smedstad’s work Centuryfuge 255, one of the video works featured in the Screens exhibition, 1997. From the same exhibition, artist/architect Vibeke Jensen will be represented in a video interview recorded in the early 2000’s. There will be a film by Inger Lise Hansen, a Trondheim native, and an internationally renowned experimental film maker. Documentation of the ’97 Screens exhibition will also be presented.
Of more recent works, the programme will include Flyttestein by film/video artist Kaia Hugin, a work originally commissioned for a show at Rake Visningsrom, Trondheim, in 2016. Also shown will be Uns-table, a short sound-image work made by composer Øyvind Brandtsegg together with electronic musician Tijs Ham, visual artist Piya Wanthiang and videomaker Jeremy Welsh.
The programme includes a live concert, Reconstruction V, a work for recorded sound, digital film and live contrabass, composed by Lene Grenager and performed by Michael Francis Duch with projections by Jeremy Welsh. The work was premiered in January 2022 at Inderøy Kulturhus and Dokkhuset, Trondheim, later performed at Café Hærverk in Oslo. Grenager and Duch are both members of leading contemporary music ensemble Lemur and have often collaborated with visual artists and film makers.
The duration of the programme will be approximately 90 minutes.
Jeremy Welsh, 2022
In 1997 the city of Trondheim marked its 1000th. anniversary and to celebrate this historic occasion the municipality initiated a substantial programme of cultural activities. One such event was Screens, a major festival of electronic and digital art, taking place at several venues across the city during the month of October. The background to this festival lay several years earlier in the establishment of the Intermedia Department at Trondheim Academy of Art and the city of Trondheim’s positioning of itself as Norway’s primary centre for research and development in new technologies. The year before Screens, 1996, saw the establishment of NTNU, the Norwegian University for Science and Technology. The art academy was incorporated into the new university, within the faculty of architecture (AD fakultetet). An interest in culture and new technology had been steadily growing in Norway throughout the nineteen nineties, and a number of other significant cultural manifestations had already taken place, including Electra at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Bærum and the Cyberconf, the sixth international conference on cyberculture, held at the University of Oslo in June 1997 with an exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Earlier in the decade (1993) the printmaking workshop Atelier Nord in Oslo established facilities for video editing and computer graphics, starting the organization’s transition to become Norway’s first artists’ media centre.
Screens was developed in response to a challenge from the cultural section of Trondheim municipality to arrange an event celebrating the city’s profile as a centre for research and development within new technologies and the arts. Jeremy Welsh and Espen Gangvik were co-curators and producers of the festival, which was supported by the city, by Arts Council Norway, The Nordic Council of Ministers and the EU. International partners included Färgfabriken, centre for art and architecture in Stockholm and The Film and Video Umbrella (FVU), a curatorial and production agency for artists’ film and video in London. The main site of the programme was Trondheim Kunstmuseum, which housed a series of video works and interactive digital installations, as well as sculptural works created through digital technologies. Close by, at the Archbishop’s palace of Nidarosdomen (Trondheim Cathedral) “The Messenger” a major work of US artist Bill Viola was staged in a medieval chapel., while at the same time his earlier work “Anthem” was shown at the museum. This was the first significant presentation in Norway of the work of Viola, one of the most established names in international video art.
Elsewhere in the city, screenings, seminars, performances and a conference were staged at venues including Lademoen Artists’ Centre and Trondheim Cinematheque. A survey exhibition of work by students emerging from the art academy’s Intermedia Department was shown at the Academy’s own space, Galleri KiT.
Several new works for the exhibition were commissioned by Screens, while others were restaged, including the Viola installation that had first been exhibited at Durham Cathedral in England. Parts of the programme were co-curated by partners Jan Åman (Färgfabriken) and Steven Bode (FVU). The seminar programme brought together significant speakers from fields including media theory, media archeology, architecture and digital art. A special edition of the art academy newspaper Kitsch functioned as catalogue for the festival, and was accompanied by a CD Rom that included specially made digital works by artists commissioned for Screens.
The Screens publication featured texts by a number of leading theoreticians within art and new media, including Lev Manovich, whose subsequent book The Language of New Media became one of the key reference books of the early 21st century. For the Screens catalogue Lev Manovich contributed a text entitled Archeology of a Computer Screen, a theme he developed further in a lecture at the Screens conference. He traces the development of the screen as window/interface to another space or reality from Renaissance painting, through photography and film, to contemporary VR and digital screen culture. While describing the historical progressions of the screen format he also differentiates between the origins and evolutions of different technologies:
“The origins of the cinema’s screen are well known. We can trace its emergence to the popular spectacles and entertainment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: magic lantern shows, phantasmagoria, eidophusikon, panorama, diorama, zoopraxiscope shows, and so on. The public was ready for cinema and when it finally appeared it was a huge public event. Not by accident the ”invention” of cinema was claimed by at least a dozen individuals from a half dozen countries.
The origin of the computer screen is a different story. It appears in the middle of the century but it does not become a public presence until much later; and its history has not yet been written. Both of these facts are related to the context in which it emerged; as with all other elements of modern human-computer interface, the computer screen was developed by the military. Its history has to do not with public entertainment but with military surveillance.”
In the 25 years since the Screens festival, the ubiquity of screens and related technologies has complicated the story proposed by Lev Manovich in his prescient text. By now there are many histories of computer technologies and the field of media archeology is well established, whilst the role of the screen as an instrument of surveillance has transcended its military genesis to deliver us to the culture of global surveillance capitalism.
Another leading theorist of digital technologies and media archeology is Finnish academic Erkki Huhtamo, now a professor at UCLA. Huhtamo contributed a lecture on media archeology to the Screens conference, performed “remotely” as a pre-recorded guide to his “museum of media archeology” – a large collection of pre-digital display technologies.
During Meta.Morf 2022, the legacy of Screens will be celebrated in a talk, screening and concert at Trondheim Cinematek on Friday 17th. June. The screening programme will include works from the original Screens exhibition, such as Ivar Smedstad’s video Centuryfuge 255, a work that is equally relevant today in its imagery of industrial machinery manipulated digitally through morphing software. As much a reiteration of tropes of early avantgarde cinema as an exploration of digital image processing, it is a work that sits at the cusp of the analog/digital divide in moving image culture and reads as a document of post-industrial culture. Also included in the programme will be a live cinema event that is a collaboration between composer Lene Greenager, musician Michael Francis Duch and video artist Jeremy Welsh. Like Ivar Smedstad’s video from the mid nineties, this is a work that takes the heritage of industrial production as a starting point. Lene Grenager made sound and video recordings of machinery from the textile industry and then developed a composition based on sound samples from these recordings. A score for live double bass was added to the base track of machine sounds, and then a digital film was made using the video recordings, combined with still photographs from similar post-industrial environments. The resulting work is a 28 minute performance featuring digital video projection, electronic sound and live contrabass. The work was first performed in January 2022 at Inderøy Kulturhus and Dokkhuset, Trondheim.
The Screens exhibition and festival in itself was one of the largest manifestations of art and new technology to take place in Scandinavia during the nineties, but one of its most important legacies arose from a special meeting held at Lademoen Kunstnerverksted with representatives from the visual arts department of the Norwegian Arts Council. A consequence of this meeting was that a working group was established to look into the production opportunities for electronic arts in Norway and to produce a report with recommendations for what might be done to consolidate the field. The working group was established in 1998 under the leadership of artist Synnøve Persen, a member of the board of the Norwegian Arts Council. Other members were artists representing the field of electronic arts; Kenneth Korstad Langås and Kristin Bergaust, both from Atelier Nord; sound artist Siri Austeen, and Jeremy Welsh, professor of Intermedia at KiT/NTNU. The group’s secretary was Anne Wiland, who authored the document SKJØNNHETEN OG UTSTYRET, produksjonsnettverk for elektronisk basert billedkunst, arbeidsnotat nr. 31. The document was based on a series of meetings held by the working group during 1998, and a study trip to Germany and The Netherlands, where several media arts centres were visited in order to collate information about the various models and organization structures that were in place.
The recommendation of the working group was the establishment of new media centres in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen, and a national network, the Production Network for Electronic Arts (PNEK) to be based on these three centres in addition to NOTAM, the Norwegian Centre for Technology, Art & Music in Oslo. Atelier Nord was already established as an Oslo node, while BEK (Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts) was soon to be founded, and in Trondheim, Top Floor, a digital arts workshop at Lademoen Kunstnersenter was initiated, and formed the basis for what subsequently became TEKS, Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre in 2002.
A further consequence of the process initiated at the Trondheim meeting in 1997 was the creation of a specific funding initiative for Art and New Technology within the visual arts department at Arts Council Norway. This became formalised in the autumn of 2001, with its own specialist committee, led by Jeremy Welsh. For the first time in Norway, a funding structure existed with the specific mandate to support and stimulate developments within art and technology. For almost two decades, numerous experimental art and technology projects were made possible through the support of this fund.
PNEK, the Production Network for Electronic Arts, was also established in 2000, with a national coordinator based at Atelier Nord in Oslo. BEK had been started in Bergen, partly as a result of projects developed for Bergen as European City of Culture in 2000. The initial intention for PNEK was that it should stimulate and co-ordinate collaborative activities between the various nodes. The first collective effort was the workshop/performance/exhibition The Living Room, arranged in Trondheim in the autumn of 2001 with participants from TEKS, BEK, Atelier Nord and NOTAM. A five day production workshop was held in Galleri KiT, the art academy’s exhibition space, with a public exhibition and performance at the end of the week. The event was interdisciplinary and experimental in nature and had much in common with other productions that mixed the disciplines of visual art, electronic music and performing arts. For example, the workshop Hot Wired Live Art in Bergen in 2000, which included performance group Motherboard (Per Platou, Amanda Steggel, Ulf Knudsen). Motherboard had already established a reputation as innovators within dance and the performing arts through performances at the Electra exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. They pioneered the use of live, internet-based video in performance, using the early technology CUCme, and one of their collaborators was Canadian artist Michelle Teran, who would later become an artistic researcher in Bergen and then an associate professor at Trondheim Academy of Art. Another significant group within the live arts was Verdensteatret, whose complex stage shows combined live performance, robotics, video projection and digital sound. In Bergen the performance group Baktruppen were also innovators in the field of live arts. BiT teatergarasjen, Bergen’s stage for experimental performance practices, has been an important meeting point for artists from a broad range of backgrounds, and as part of a national network that includes Teaterhuset Avant Garden (Rosendal Teater) in Trondheim and Black Box in Oslo, has provided an outlet for art and technology projects that are geared towards theatrical presentation rather than exhibition.
Over ensuing years the PNEK network expanded to take in new nodes including i/o Lab in Stavanger, Atopia in Oslo, Lydgalleriet (The Sound Gallery) and Piksel festival in Bergen. Support for the network was withdrawn in 2018 and it was formally dissolved in 2021, though several of the nodes are still in operation and continue to publicize their activities through new network collaborations. The earmarked funding for Art and New Technology was terminated in 2018 and subsequently art and technology projects were expected to apply alongside all other cultural activities to the various funding streams within the Arts Council. Funding was also cut for i/o Lab and Atopia, two of the longer running projects within the PNEK system. i/o Lab had developed a strong focus on bio art and arranged several festivals or exhibitions highlighting this field. Atopia had started out as an informal screening room and meeting place for film and video artists, and went on to develop the public screening project Vitrine, using the gallery’s large street-level display windows. Atopia’s artistic director Farhad Kalantary also curated Retrospective, a major survey of artists’ film and video in Norway from 1960 to 1990, staged at Stenersens Museum in Oslo.
Trondheim’s status as one of the Nordic region’s most important nodes for digital art has been carried forward by TEKS through several programmes and initiatives. Between 2002 – 2010 TEKS arranged the annual festival Trondheim Matchmaking, a meeting place for artists and technologists, aimed at creating platforms for collaboration. The project was terminated after 2009 and superseded by Meta.Morf which began in 2010 as an international biennale of art and technology, presenting an ambitious programme of exhibitions, performances, conferences and seminars at multiple venues in the city of Trondheim.
Each edition of Meta.Morf has had a particular theme and focus, thus allowing it to concentrate more specifically on a given curatorial concept, rather than functioning as a survey or showcase such as Ars Electronica. A brief look at the subtitles of the seven editions of Meta.Morf to date illustrates the range of themes, topics and issues that have been highlighted in the biennale’s programmes. New.Brave.World in 2010; A Matter of Feeling in 2012; Lost in Transition, 2014; Nice to be in Orbit!, 2016; A Beautiful Accident, 2018; The Digital Wild, 2020 and Ecophilia, 2022. Since 2018 TEKS.studio has been in operation as a gallery and event space, presenting solo exhibitions by artists working with technology, and organizing workshops and seminars. A publishing platform. TEKS.press, has also been established, building upon the series of Meta.Morf publications that have followed the biennale. The most recent publishing project is “Elektronisk Kunst i Norge” (Electronic Art in Norway) a compendium of artist profiles covering the period from 1960 to the present, and edited by Zane Cerpina, Ståle Stenslie and Jøran Rudi.
In 2022 Notam, BEK, Lydgalleriet, Atelier Nord, Piksel and TEKS are all still active with varied programmes including exhibitions, workshops, production, seminars and festivals. 2022 sees the latest edition of Meta.Morf, back in public spaces in Trondheim, Namsos and Inderøy after the 2020 edition had been suddenly suspended due to Covid restrictions, which came into force only days after the opening March 5. Though most of the postponed programme eventually was presented during the autumn of 2020, the 2022 edition will be the first full-scale event since 2018. The 25 years that separate Screens from Meta.Morf 2022 have seen many developments within the art and technology field, a broadening of the technologies and practices with which artists engage, a limited incursion into the mainstream of contemporary art, and the rise and fall of certain genres. For example, net.art had its heyday in the 1990’s and early 2000’s when artists, activists and hackers took to the internet as an arena with great potential. The subsequent corporatisation of the world wide web and the ubiquity of commercial online services eroded the possibilities, while technological developments quickly rendered many experimental net-based projects obsolete. The recent surge of interest in NFT art perhaps indicates a new era of internet-based art, but what has been seen so far does not indicate the kind of radical, critical approach that was characteristic of earlier net art, but rather an opportunistic engagement with online finance and crypto currencies. Coming years will show whether this new form will mature to become an important area of art practice, or if it will turn out to be another in a history of short lived phenomena within digital culture.
Concurrent with the ongoing expansion of electronic, digital and other technological art practices, the field of digital humanities and the connected practices of digital literature have also undergone a major development over the past two decades. Within the Norwegian context the University of Bergen has been the primus motor for developments in this field, through the work of Scott Rettberg, Jill Walker Rettberg and colleagues at the institute for digital culture within the faculty of Linguistics, Literary and Aesthetic Studies. Their multi-disciplinary research has embraced a range of practices including digital poetry and fiction; non-linear film, game development, VR and digital art. At the University of Oslo, research has focussed on media archeology and histories of the moving image in relation to visual art, while at Oslo Met, digital artist Kristin Bergaust, one of the initiators of PNEK, has developed a research project that encompasses VR technologies, bio art and augmented reality technologies. At NTNU in Trondheim the institute for music technology, under the leadership of composer Øyvind Brandtsegg, is currently the environment that focuses most on developments in technological art practice, while the department of Fine Art no longer has a clear commitment to art and technology developments. An inter-faculty network for art and technology within NTNU, although a promising initiative, failed to deliver the standard of artistic projects that could have been expected. It could also be claimed that by not forging a close relationship with Meta.Morf as a logical “shop window” for research in art and technology in Trondheim, NTNU missed an opportunity that could have enhanced its international standing as an innovative university.
In 2022 the new National Museum will open in Oslo, and with the exception of showing a few film/video works, there is so far no indication that the museum has ambitions to develop any major innovations in the exhibition of technological art. The national Video Art Archive, developed through PNEK and Atelier Nord between 2011- 2020, is now localized within the library and archive department of the museum, but so far there is no indication that the museum intends to actively promote this digital collection. Major public exhibition spaces that show some commitment to presenting technological art include Kunstnernes Hus, Henie Onstad art centre and Bergen Kunsthall, and in all cases, the art and technology component of overall exhibition programmes is somewhat limited. Many contemporary exhibitions inevitably include some proportion of electronic or digital art, and it is indisputable that video and film are a central part of the contemporary mainstream. However, the more experimental, technologically challenging and aesthetically radical aspects of technological art are mostly absent from the programmes of major museums and galleries.
While the uptake of art and technology projects within the museum and gallery sector has been slow, several festivals have been more pro-active, in particular the contemporary music festivals Ultima in Oslo and Borealis in Bergen. New Music Norway’s annual Only Connect festival has also provided an arena for electronic music and digital sound art, while Punkt festival in Kristiansand, led by composer and musician Jan Bang, has a particular niche and a clear profile within contemporary electronic music. Piksel in Bergen, led by artist Gisle Frøysland, has developed a clear focus on the links between art, technology and activism in its profiling of open source software and hardware and related strategies of repurposing, reusing or recycling technologies within an experimental framework. Norway currently has three gallery spaces that are dedicated to the exhibition of technological art projects; TEKS.studio, Atelier Nord and Lydgalleriet. All of these operate with limited budgets and require a high level of dedication from small production teams to deliver ambitious exhibition projects.
Meta.Morf 2022 opens at a moment when the whole cultural sector in Norway and beyond is emerging from a two year hiatus caused by the Corona pandemic. How large international festivals and biennales will operate in the future is so far unknown. Also unknown is how the termination of PNEK and the abolition of the fund for art and new technology will impact technological art practices in Norway in the near future. It is something of a paradox that in an era when society’s dependence upon networked technology has been so clearly emphasized, that there is a lack of commitment from public funding bodies and educational establishments to actively and ambitiously build a culture of critical and creative technological art practices. Although it is true that younger generations have grown up with technology and have a different kind of digital literacy, this in itself is not enough to build a sustainable field of professional practice – any more that the ability to hold a pencil would have guaranteed that previous generations might become great painters.
With its material wealth, its particular demographics, an increasingly international and multi-cultural society, a high average level of education and a nation-wide network of cultural institutions, Norway is well-positioned to become a leading international actor within contemporary culture, which logically, must encompass a high level of engagement with new technologies and a commitment to support and develop experimental and innovative artistic practices across all branches of culture. This requires a reassessment of current funding strategies at national and local levels as well as a broadening of the understanding of contemporary art practices within the major exhibiting institutions. The role of Meta.Morf will, in short, continue to be crucial in raising awareness of the fields of technological art, while the remaining nodes of the PNEK network will continue to be the basis for the ongoing development of art and technology projects within Norway.
Further reading:
Elektronisk Kunst i Norge, bind I: Kunstnere og verk fra 1960 til 2020. Eds. Zane Cerpina, Jøran Rudi, Ståle Stenslie. TEKS.press, 2021.
Around Which Dissonant Satellites Cluster: 20 år med Bergen senter for elektronisk kunst. Eds. Vilde Salhus Røed, Maria Rusinovskaya. BEK, 2022.
PARADOKS: posisjoner innen norsk videokunst 1980 – 2010. Eds. Eva Klerck Gange, Birgitte Sauge, Marianne Yvenes. Nasjonalmuseet / Museet for samtidskunst, 2013.
Tech-Stiles. Eds. Charis Gullickson, Morten Johan Svendsen, Knut Ljøgodt, Hilde Hauan Johnsen. Sogn & Fjordane Kunstmuseum, 2012.
Maleri med Tid: Om modernisme, filmisk avantgarde og videokunst. Per Kvist. Novus Forlag, 2013.
Lives and Videotapes: The Inconsistent History of Norwegian Video Art. Marit Paasche. Feil Forlag / Videokunstarkiv, 2014.
Retrospektiv: film- og videokunst i Norge, 1960 – 90. Eds. Farhad Kalantary, Linn Lervik. Atopia Stiftelse, 2011.
Eksenter (Hvor finner kunst sted). Leiken Vik & Solveig Lønmo. Forlaget Press, 2016.
Elektrisk Lyd i Norge fra 1930 til 2005. Jøran Rudi. Novus Forlag, 2019.
Remediating the social: Electronic literature as a model of creativity and innovation in practice. Ed. Simon Biggs. University of Bergen, Dept. of Linguistic, Literary & Aesthetic Studies, 2013.
Header Graphics: “Flyttestein” by Kaia Hugin.
Meta.Morf 2022 / ReMida Trondheim / Workshop for children April 25 – May 8, 2022.
Workshop exhibition May 7 & 8, 13.00 – 15.00 / Curator: Pål Bøyesen
An important aspect of children playing and learning to understand the world is to place us and all living beings in relation to each other and the surroundings. What kind of materials children have access to in everyday life then becomes important for this play to unfold.
ReMida invites children into a room with a variety of natural materials: sticks, stones, clay, shells, seeds, etc. as a starting point for constructing worlds with new connections and ideas about what nature is and can be for us on Earth.
Snow cannons already exist, we want to manipulate the clouds; how can we pollinate all the flowers while discussing how to grow food on Mars? Maybe can the children create new machines that help nature put us on a new track as well?
There will be opportunities to draw along the way, and as a contrast to nature, we want the children to construct machines that we build together and set in motion within the new natural environment. Here, artist Øystein Kjørstad Fjeldbo will assist with his expertise in the use of sensors, mechanics and sound.
Norsk følger under
Curator and moderator, Zane Cerpina, 2022
This conference is about love. About our love for nature. But what is nature really? Except for some made up ecological dreamscapes? Ecology comes from Greek Oikos, meaning home. But in this age of man-made catastrophes, has our home become unrecognizable and alien?
The doomsday scenarios and environmental apocalypses have become iconic images of nature today. Yet the same bleak visions of the future lure us back to nature. We have this innate desire for a natural condition. As if we need that green, lush, fertile and romantic portrait of a paradise lost. Some wonderful place we once belonged.
Then again, what is nature? Can it really be pure? Pristine? Saved? Or is it, as many experience it; arrogant, fierce, unforgiving and even destructive? And what about man-made nature? Should we embrace it or once for all cancel it? And why do we care so much about the division man versus nature?
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia Conference explores contemporary forms and manifestations of human affection to nature. The conference investigates what it means to be a real ecophile –a true lover of nature– in our world marked by new technologies, environmental disasters, biotechnological wonders, and blurred borders between the made and the natural.
American biologist Edward O. Wilson defines biophilia as an innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life. To him, our human love for nature is a product of biological evolution. We are dependent on nature and its resources to survive and thrive. Therefore it is only natural to seek close bonds with it. Likewise ecophilia refers to our desire and impulse to connect, merge, and become one with nature. Yet there is no universal understanding of it.
Today we find ourselves in the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch marked by massive human impact on the planet Earth. We no longer roam around the savannah like our ancestors did. More than half of us live in cities with pristine nature at a great distance. Most of us build our image, experience and definition of nature through the optics of digital technologies. With our environment and lifestyle having shifted so profoundly, what exactly do we mean by nature that we so desperately desire to connect to? Desperation is always interesting to examine, and our conference speakers do so by investigating ecophilia from several perspectives, desires and a wide range of creative angles and disciplines.
So what is this nature that we are so attached to? Is it the color green? Is green really as ecological as we like to think? Does nature need rewilding? Or is it the culturally bound concept of nature that has to be revised.
Are technologies expanding or limiting our experiences and understandings of the nonhuman world? Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help us to build new relationships with nature? Or should we instead genetically modify our own bodies to become better and naturalized ecophiles?
Can one be too much of an ecophile? And what happens when our relationship with nature turns into something sexual – an ecosexual fetish? Do we need to understand the role sexuality plays in our relationship to ecology?
How to move on if our ecophiliac actions feel like outright failures? What to do when you are weighed down by eco-guilt? Are we eco-shamed? And how is our relationship to nature shaped not only by -philia (affection for) but also -phobia (obsessive fear of)?
The Ecophilia Conference critically questions what it truly means to be an ecophile in the age of the Anthropocene.
Let’s pull the green curtain away and get dirty.
Kurator and moderator, Zane Cerpina, 2022
Denne konferansen handler om kjærlighet. Om vår kjærlighet til naturen. Men hva er egentlig natur? Bortsett fra noen oppdiktede økologiske drømmelandskap? Økologi kommer fra det greske Oikos, som betyr hjem. Men i denne tiden med menneskeskapte katastrofer, har hjemmet vårt blitt ugjenkjennelig og fremmed?
Dommedagsscenarioene og miljøapokalypsene har blitt ikoniske bilder av naturen i vår tid. Likevel lokker de samme dystre fremtidsvisjonene oss tilbake til naturen. Vi har dette medfødte ønsket om en naturlig tilstand. Som om vi trenger det grønne, frodige, fruktbare og romantiske portrettet av et tapt paradis. Et fantastisk sted vi en gang tilhørte.
Så igjen, hva er natur? Kan den virkelig være ren? Uberørt? Reddet? Eller er den, slik mange opplever den, arrogant, voldsom, uforsonlig og til og med destruktiv? Og hva med menneskeskapt natur? Skal vi omfavne den eller en gang for alle avslutte den? Og hvorfor bryr vi oss så mye om inndelingen menneske versus natur?
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia-konferansen utforsker moderne former og manifestasjoner av menneskets hengivenhet til naturen. Konferansen undersøker hva det vil si å være en ekte økofil –en ekte naturelsker– i vår verden preget av ny teknologi, miljøkatastrofer, bioteknologiske underverker og uskarpe skillelinjer mellom det fremstilte og det naturlige.
Den amerikanske biologen Edward O. Wilson definerer biofili som en medfødt trang til å knytte seg til andre livsformer. For ham er vår menneskelige kjærlighet til naturen et produkt av biologisk evolusjon. Vi er avhengige av naturen og dens ressurser for å overleve og trives. Derfor er det helt naturlig å søke nære bånd med den. På samme måte viser økofili til vårt ønske og vår impuls til å knytte oss til, smelte sammen med og bli ett med naturen. Likevel er det ingen universell forståelse av den.
I dag befinner vi oss i antropocen – en ny geologisk epoke preget av massiv menneskelig påvirkning på planeten vår. Vi streifer ikke lenger rundt på savannen slik våre forfedre gjorde. Mer enn halvparten av oss bor i byer langt unna uberørt natur. De fleste av oss bygger vårt selvbilde, vår opplevelse og definisjon av naturen gjennom optikken i digitale teknologier. Når miljøet og livsstilen vår har endret seg i så stor grad, hva mener vi egentlig med natur som vi så desperat ønsker å knytte oss til? Desperasjon er alltid interessant å undersøke, og våre konferansedeltakere gjør det ved å undersøke økofili fra flere perspektiver og ønsker og et bredt spekter kreative vinkler og disipliner.
Så hva er denne naturen vi er så knyttet til? Er det fargen grønn? Er grønt virkelig så økologisk som vi liker å tro? Trenger naturen gjenoppretting? Eller er det det kulturelt bundne naturbegrepet som må revideres?
Utvider eller begrenser teknologi våre erfaringer og forståelser av den ikke-menneskelige verden? Kan kunstig intelligens hjelpe oss med å bygge nye relasjoner til naturen? Eller bør vi i stedet genmodifisere vår egen kropp for å bli bedre og naturaliserte økofile?
Kan man være for mye økofil? Og hva skjer når forholdet vårt til naturen blir noe seksuelt – en økoseksuell fetisj? Trenger vi å forstå hvilken rolle seksualitet spiller i vårt forhold til økologi?
Hvordan fortsette hvis våre økofile handlinger føles som direkte fiaskoer? Hva gjør du når du er tynget av øko-skyld? Er vi øko-skammet? Og hvordan er vårt forhold til naturen formet, ikke bare av -fili (kjærlighet for), men også -fobi (tvangsmessig frykt for)?
Ecophilia-konferansen stiller kritiske spørsmål ved hva det virkelig vil si å være en økofil i antropocen-epoken.
La oss ta bort det grønne teppet og skitne oss til.
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / Dokkhuset / Concert May 18 @ 20.00 / Doors open 19.30
Tickets NOK 190/250 here
Every living thing will die is a performance that asks, and even attempts to answer, a lot of answerless questions.
Are we humans still a part of nature, or have we parted and are now looking at nature from the outside, rather trying to manage it? What kind of value is there in all our knowledge about math, philosophy, art and technology? Will there still be any value left in a world without humans to observe it? That world will exist at some point in time. Either in a hundred or a hundred thousand years, there will be a world without us. If humanity, our greed and our cognitive abilities have been developed by evolution, does that imply that letting humans destroy the climate simply will be an act of letting evolutions take its course?
Every living thing will die is a text based performance, about the relationship between humans and nature and how they relate. The text is written by Eirik Havnes, music by Lars Ove Fossheim and Eirik Havnes for a quartet of them and drummer Martin Langlie and tubaist Heida Karine Johannesdottir Mobeck.
Eirik Havnes is a poet that brings existential thoughts and problems into an everyday conversation, in an unique and informal mix of rhyming poetry and well timed monologues. A format he found and perfected in the 2020 live recorded show “Life” that describes a life from conception till death. This time around he focuses on not a singular life, but life on earth in general, humanity as a concept and the absurdity of life, in a high paced enchanting monologue.
The music is a playful mix of 80s retrofuturism, science fiction, harsh noise, field recordings and fundamental music principles found in enthic music from all over the world. A musical journey that combines the obviously technological, structured and digital with the chaotic, organic and natural.
Text: Eirik Havnes
Music: Lars Ove Fossheim
Band:
Lars Ove Fossheim, guitar, electronics
Eirik Havnes, guitar, electronics
Martin Langlie, drums, electronics
Heida Karine Johannesdottir Mobeck, tuba, electronics
The performance is a commissioned work for Meta.Morf 2022 under the auspices of Jazzfest and TEKS – Trondheim Elektroniske Kunstsenter.
Supported by Arts Council Norway.
Eirik Havnes & Lars Ove Fossheim
Eirik Havnes er en poet, musiker, komponist og lydkunstner fra Ålesund som de siste årene har jobbet med natur som et gjennomgående tema innen alle sine kunstretninger.
Dokumentarfilmen Polyfonatura fra 2019 tar for seg hans arbeid med feltopptak som musikalske instrumenter, mens Livet av Havnes fra 2020 er en poesifilm som har definert Havnes som en nyskapende formidler av aktuelle filosofiske og politiske spørsmål. Havnes ble nominert til Edvard-prisen for teksten til Livet.
Lars Ove Fossheim er en gitarist og komponist fra Volda med en fot innen kunstrock og en annen innen minimalitisk samtidsmusikk. Han har utmerket seg som en nyskapende gitarisk via band som Broen, Skadedyr, Snøskred og Your Headlights are On, med fokus på klang, tekstur og en utvidelse av gitarens.
Eirik Havnes is a poet, musician, composer and sound artist from Ålesund who in recent years has worked with nature as a recurring theme in all his art directions. The documentary Polyfonatura from 2019 deals with his work with field recordings as musical instruments, while The Life of Havnes from 2020 is a poetry film that has defined Havnes as an innovative communicator of current philosophical and political issues. Havnes was nominated for the Edvard Prize for the text of Life.
Lars Ove Fossheim is a guitarist and composer from Volda with one foot in art rock and another in minimalist contemporary music. He has excelled as an innovative guitarist via bands such as Broen, Skadedyr, Snøskred and Your Headlights are On, with a focus on sound, texture and an extension of the guitar.
Header Graphics and Portrait Photograph: Christian Winther.
Norsk følger under
Curator Zane Cerpina, 2022
Ecophilia? Think of Ecophilia as our deep desire to connect with nature. But what is nature really? Except for some made up ecological dreamscapes?
Ecology comes from Greek Oikos, meaning home. Today every aspect of our home is altered by new technologies, man-induced environmental disasters, biotechnological wonders, and blurred borders between the made and the natural. Has our home become alien to us in this age of global ecological transformations? How is ecophilia manifested in the Anthropocene?
The Ecophilia exhibitions of Meta.Morf 2022 present artists who critically question what it means to be a real ecophile –a true lover of nature– today. And how to become better at it?
Ecophilia exhibitions take place at three galleries in Trondheim: i) K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, ii) Trøndelag Center for Contemporary Art, and iii) TEKS.studio. These exhibitions investigate strange concepts of nature and all wonderful manifestations of our love for it.
SPEAKING NATURE
In our search to become better ecophiles, we are desperate to upgrade our communication with nature. Will we ever succeed in truly understanding its language? In the installation Birdsong, Leena Saarinen brings together languages of people and birds by visualizing bird whistle tones through spectrograms. This allows the viewer to read bird songs just like we read words.
And what about understanding plants, who communicate with each other in ways invisible and inaudible to humans? María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde’s video installation Beyond Human Perception compares human and plant response to live music, demonstrating how technology can bring us closer to cross-species conversations.
Then again, humans seem to forget that they are part of nature too. How to love nature within us? In Annike Flo’s work States of Chimera, agar growth medium is contaminated with her own microorganisms to create a living sculpture. This is a manifestation for erotic and queer love for the human body.
BECOMING NATURE
Extreme measures can be taken to satisfy our desire for ultimate naturalness. Yang Zhichao merges symbiotically with nature in the performance Planting Grass where a surgeon inserts two pieces of grass into the artist’s shoulder. What does the inevitable and painful bodily rejection of the plant roots tell us about our physical bonds with nature?
If our bodies refuse to incorporate more nature within us, can we immerse ourselves in nature instead? In the durational artwork Be-coming Tree, Jatun Risba lays naked in the forest throughout seasons as if she is one with the mycelium network of trees.
What would happen if we traded our comfort with the living conditions of animals? With the help of prosthetics, Thomas Thwaites takes on the seemingly careless life of a goat in his work Goatman (A holiday from being human). Roaming together with his newfound four-legged companions, Twaites contemplates stripping away the role of humans in the hierarchy of nature.
BECOMING ECOPHILE
Can thinking from the perspective of non-humans make us better ecophiles? What if a true form of ecophilia requires us to give back to nature more than we have taken? To Flavour Our Tears: eyePhones v. 3.0 by The Center for Genomic Gastronomy allows the audience to explore their role as a sustainable food source to other species. Why not flavour our bodies to taste better?
How far are we willing to modify our bodies to benefit non-humans? In the work I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin…, Ai Hasegawa speculates on becoming a surrogate mother to pass on the genes of endangered species. Can nature finally seek refuge in our man-made Oikos?
Should ecophiles provide services to nature? Hibernaculum (Moth-) by Marius Presterud is an ecovention inviting insects back to cities. Making sculptures from materials found in urban environments he creates refuge for moths.
There are many ways an ecophile can cater for non-human needs. In the work Manure From Money, Marius Presterud utilizes coins to extract vital micronutrients such as iron, copper and zinc that are vital for plants.
And what about those who refuse to accept and embrace their role in nature as a giver and a lover? How to make sure that we all care? In her installation Aquadisia, Stephanie Rothenberg proposes to utilize genetic engineering and the mythical powers of the oysters to create a serum turning humans into more compassionate beings.
ANTHROPOCENE NATURE
The real challenge to sustain ourselves without nature is poorly understood. The Life Support System by disnovation.org exposes the fundamental importance of the natural ecosystems by creating an artificial, closed-loop system to cultivate a one square meter of wheat. Another 99 such high-cost units are necessary to sustain a human for one year.
In the Anthropocene, nature is increasingly marked by environmental changes and the extinction of species. How to cope with the disappearance of nature? In the video installation Goth Beekeeping Marius Presterud begets a ritual burning to confront the loss of natural habitat due to ever expanding human-built environments.
Can paradise lost be immortalized through digital technologies? In his work Re-Animated, Jakob Kudsk Steensen creates a vast virtual landscape to show the disappearance of the Kaua’i ʻōʻō bird from the islands of Hawai’i. Do we really care about the lost nature? Or are we simply drawn to the spectacle of ecological disasters?
In his installation No Man’s Land Frank Ekeberg uses sound to illustrate the disappearance of rainforest in the west coast of Norway. Transitions from rich and natural to digitally created soundscapes lead the audience into speculations about the future. Can our lost nature be replaced by artificial life?
Or are we drifting through fictional worlds to escape the reality of the Anthropocene? Annie Hägg’s video installation PsXCare uses the aesthetics of a video game to address the unsustainable consumption of natural resources in order to maintain our beautiful virtual landscapes.
And how do these blurred lines between the made and natural affect our philias towards nature? A Bestiary of the Anthropocene by disnovation.org helps to navigate the new hybrid beings that coexist with us in this post-natural era. Can we ever truly love the emergent species of the Anthropocene?
Nature is always in constant change. What if we would lose our man-made nature too? Maren Dagny Juell’s video installation The Party looks back at our obsession with plastic from a future perspective. Will today’s plastic products once become rare and fetishistic objects in a post-plastic world?
Now it is time to dive into ecophilia.
Unleash your inner ecophile.
Go find your love. Your true nature.
Kurator Zane Cerpina, 2022
Økofili? Tenk på økofili som vår dype trang til å knytte oss til naturen. Men hva er egentlig natur? Bortsett fra noen oppdiktede økologiske drømmelandskap?
Økologi kommer fra det greske Oikos, som betyr hjem. I dag er ethvert aspekt av hjemmet vårt endret av ny teknologi, menneskeskapte miljøkatastrofer, bioteknologiske underverker og uklare skillelinjer mellom det tilvirkede og det naturlige. Har hjemmet vårt blitt fremmed for oss i denne tiden med globale økologiske transformasjoner? Hvordan manifesterer økofili seg i antropocen?
I Ecophilia-utstillingene på Meta.Morf 2022 presenteres kunstnere som stiller kritiske spørsmål ved hva det vil si å være en ekte økofil – en sann elsker av naturen – i dag. Og hvordan bli bedre til det?
Ecophilia-utstillingene finner sted på tre gallerier i Trondheim: i) K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, ii) Trøndelag senter for samtidskunst og iii) TEKS.studio. Disse utstillingene utforsker merkverdige naturbegreper og fantastiske manifestasjoner av vår kjærlighet til den.
SNAKKE NATUR
I vår søken etter å bli bedre økofile er vi desperate etter å oppgradere vår kommunikasjon med naturen. Vil vi noen gang lykkes med virkelig å forstå språket? I installasjonen Birdsong fører Leena Saarinen språket til mennesker og fugler sammen ved å visualisere fuglekvitter gjennom spektrogrammer. På denne måten kan seeren lese fuglesanger akkurat som vi leser ord.
Og hva med å forstå planter, som kommuniserer med hverandre på måter som er usynlige og uhørbare for mennesker? María Castellanos og Alberto Valverdes videoinstallasjon Beyond Human Perception sammenligner menneskers og planters respons på levende musikk og viser hvordan teknologi kan bringe oss nærmere å føre samtaler på tvers av arter.
Men igjen ser det ut til at menneskene glemmer at også de er en del av naturen. Hvordan elske naturen i oss? I Annike Flos verk States of Chimera kontamineres agarvekstmedium med hennes egne mikroorganismer for å skape en levende skulptur. Dette er en manifestasjon av erotisk og skeiv kjærlighet til menneskekroppen.
BLI NATUR
Ekstreme tiltak kan iverksettes for å tilfredsstille vårt ønske om maksimal naturlighet. Yang Zhichao smelter symbiotisk sammen med naturen i performancen Planting Grass hvor en kirurg innsetter to gressbiter i kunstnerens skulder. Hva forteller den uunngåelige og smertefulle kroppslige avvisningen av planterøttene oss om våre fysiske bånd til naturen?
Hvis kroppene våre nekter å inkorporere mer natur i oss, kan vi fordype oss i naturen i stedet? I det kontinuerlige kunstverket Be-coming Tree ligger Jatun Risba naken i skogen gjennom årstidene som om hun er ett med mycelnettverket av trær.
Hva ville skje hvis vi byttet vår komfort med levekårene til dyr? Ved hjelp av proteser inntar Thomas Thwaites det tilsynelatende bekymringsfrie livet til en geit i sitt verk Goatman (A holiday from being human). Thwaites streifer rundt sammen med sine nyvunne firbeinte følgesvenner og funderer over å fjerne menneskets rolle i naturens hierarki.
BLI ØKOFIL
Kan det å tenke utfra ikke-menneskers perspektiv gjøre oss til bedre økofile? Hva om en ekte form for økofili krever at vi gir tilbake til naturen mer enn vi har tatt? I To Flavor Our Tears: eyePhones V. 3.0 lar The Center for Genomic Gastronomy publikum utforske rollen som bærekraftig matkilde for andre arter. Hvorfor ikke smaksette kroppen vår slik at den smaker bedre?
Hvor langt er vi villige til å modifisere kroppene våre til fordel for ikke-mennesker? I verket I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin… spekulerer Ai Hasegawa i å bli surrogatmor for å videreføre genene til truede arter. Kan naturen endelig søke tilflukt i vårt menneskeskapte Oikos?
Bør økofile yte tjenester til naturen? Hibernaculum (Moth-) av Marius Presterud er en økokonvensjon som inviterer insekter tilbake til byene. Ved å lage skulpturer av materialer funnet i urbane miljøer skaper han et tilfluktssted for møll.
Det er mange måter en økofil kan dekke ikke-menneskelige behov på. I verket Manure From Money bruker Marius Presterud mynter til å utvinne livsviktige mikronæringsstoffer som jern, kobber og sink, som er livsviktige for planter.
Og hva med de som nekter å akseptere og omfavne sin rolle i naturen som giver og elsker? Hvordan sørge for at vi alle bryr oss? I sin installasjon Aquadisia foreslår Stephanie Rothenberg å bruke genteknologi og østersens mytiske krefter til å lage et serum som gjør mennesker til mer medfølende vesener.
ANTROPOCEN NATUR
Vi har liten forståelse av den virkelige utfordringen med å opprettholde oss selv uten natur. Life Support System av disnovation.org viser den fundamentale betydningen av de naturlige økosystemene ved å lage et kunstig, lukket system for å dyrke én kvadratmeter hvete. Ytterligere 99 slike høykostnadsenheter kreves for å ernære et menneske i ett år.
I antropocen er naturen i økende grad preget av miljøendringer og utryddelse av arter. Hvordan takle forsvinningen av naturen? I videoinstallasjonen Goth Beekeeping frembringer Marius Presterud en rituell brenning for å konfrontere tapet av naturlig habitat på grunn av stadig voksende menneskeskapte omgivelser.
Kan det tapte paradis foreviges gjennom digitale teknologier? I sitt verk Re-Animated skaper Jakob Kudsk Steensen et vidstrakt virtuelt landskap for å vise forsvinningen av fuglen kauaihonningeter fra Hawaii. Bryr vi oss virkelig om den tapte naturen? Eller er vi rett og slett tiltrukket av skuet av økologiske katastrofer?
I sin installasjon Ingenmannsland bruker Frank Ekeberg lyd for å illustrere forsvinningen av regnskog på vestkysten av Norge. Overganger fra rike og naturlige til digitalt skapte lydlandskap leder publikum inn i spekulasjoner om fremtiden. Kan vår tapte natur erstattes av kunstig liv?
Eller glir vi gjennom fiktive verdener for å unnslippe realitetene ved antropocen? Annie Häggs videoinstallasjon PsXCare bruker estetikken til et videospill for å fremvise det ikke bærekraftige forbruket av naturressurser for å opprettholde våre vakre virtuelle landskap.
Og hvordan påvirker disse uskarpe linjene mellom det fremstilte og det naturlige våre filier mot naturen? A Bestiary of the Anthropocene av disnovation.org hjelper oss å navigere blant de nye hybridvesenene som eksisterer sammen med oss i denne post-naturlige epoken. Kan vi noen gang virkelig elske den fremvoksende antropocen-arten?
Naturen er alltid i konstant forandring. Hva om vi også ville miste vår menneskeskapte natur? Maren Dagny Juells videoinstallasjon The Party ser tilbake på vår besettelse med plast fra et fremtidsperspektiv. Vil dagens plastprodukter en gang bli sjeldne og fetisjistiske objekter i en post-plastisk verden?
Nå er tiden til å dykke ned i økofili.
Slipp løs din indre økofil.
Finn kjærligheten din. Din sanne natur.
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / Dokkhuset / Concert May 20 @ 20.30 / Doors open 20.30
Double concert night! Including VASSVIK: VASSVIK MEETS OMNI ANIMA / A FOOT IN BOTH WORLDS @ 22.00 / Tickets 240/300 here
Fake Synthetic Music is a concert performance, an artistic method, a record release and an ongoing exploration of the voice as instrument. Inspired by composers such as Evol, Marcus Schmickler and Maryanne Amacher, Janvin’s interest is aimed towards a physical experience of the architectural and theatrical aspects of sound, light and performance.
The acoustic voice produces simple melodic sequences. A condensed, sinewave-like sound references electronic pop, trance and techno, and the underlying idea is to create a massive physical sound experience from a single mono signal of a human voice. The sound of the voice through the microphone combines with a digital echo so that the direct signal and the digital echo play together. According to Janvin, this creates continuous difference tones that stimulate otoacoustic emissions in the listener. In performance, the entire room is filled with smoke and lit solely by four strobe lights with yellow filters. The light is triggered by the echo effect via MIDI, and the strobes flash in various rhythmic patterns designed and programmed by Morten Joh.
The audience is completely immersed in the smoke that is filled with sound and light, and the totality might provide an experience reminiscent of synesthesia or trance.
Stine Janvin
Stavanger-born vocalist, performer and sound artist Stine Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Created for variable spaces from theatres, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms, the backbone of Janvin’s projects focus on exploring performance formats, vocal instrumentation and potential dualities of the natural versus artificial, tangible/digital, and minimal/dramatic.
Header Graphics: “Fake Synthetic Music” by Stine Janvin. Photo credit: Karina Gytre.
Portrait Photograph: Jasper Kettner.
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / Dokkhuset / Concert May 20 @ 22.00
Double concert night! Including STINE JANVIN: FAKE SYNTHETIC MUSIC @ 20.30 / Doors open 20.00 / Tickets 240/300 here
In this evening concert the Sami musician and throat singer Torgeir Vassvik will merge and transform his singing with the interactive Omni Anima holophonic sound installation. The result is a spectacular transformation of Dokkhuset (the concert venue) into an immersive and visceral sound chamber, resonating with the magic of Sami Joik.
After an introductory opening performance Vassvik will continue with the onstage concert A foot in both worlds before the audience will be invited to interact with and play the Omni Anima installation themselves.
The Omni Anima project is a cross artistic collaboration between Torgeir Vassvik, artist Stahl Stenslie and artistic programmer Thom Johansen. Inspired by the enchanted, mystical, even seductive sound of joik, the project investigates how the traditional and indigenous expression of the Sami joik can be compiled, transformed, processed and shared through interactive electronic media.
Based on the magic awakening in traditional Sami joik, Omni Anima seeks to create magical sound experiences in the cross-over between ancient shamanism and new technology. The ancient joik is transformed through interactive holophonic multichannel sound systems. Via a touch-sensitive spherical instrument built as a traditional Sami drum, joik is composed into a three-dimensional world of sound in real time.
OMNI ANIMA seeks to put the audience in a state of trance like the noaiden, the Sami shaman, uses the joik to achieve. The traditional function of the trance is to send one’s spirit on trips to other places and worlds. In a similarly inspired manner, the project’s ambition is to create stimulating sound experiences that come alive in and through the audience. Hence, Omni Anima’s Latin title: ‘Everything’ (omni) and ‘Spirit’ (anima), that is, ‘everything is spirited’.
To engage and convey to an audience what joik is meant to be -voices from another world- the joik is transformed and disseminated through the use of an interactive and encompassing multi-channel, holophonic audio system. Omni Anima uses electronic media to enhance the bodily experiences of the music and make the most of the joik’s voice power. Through the immersive and physical sound experience the listeners themselves are dressed in the spirit of the animal. The project is thus aimed at a new and sensorial identification with the joik’s magic.
From a cultural perspective, Omni Anima seeks to enhance the dissemination of original forms of joik. How can new technologies contribute to the magic experience of traditional forms of expression? Here Omni Anima works towards joik being experienced as an intimate, rich and rewarding physical experience in itself and for all.
VASSVIK [Sápmi/Norway]
Loleiloleilola. Breath of a newborn. Sigh of a mountain. Ananeinaoianeina. Rumble of the sea. Creak of an open door in the wind. Neijinaneijino. Hum of a sun in December. All is alive and connected, and Joik is the essence of it. Joik is a place, a person, an animal, a flower, a state of mind.
With his band VASSVIK the circumpolar Sami sound poet Torgeir Vassvik develops new visions of the animistic Joik, the vocal art of the Sami indigenous people of Northern Europe. He embeds it into an Arctic avant-garde sound. It is rooted in folk, classical, jazz and impro music. Torgeir’s Joik reveals deep and beautiful vibrations and overtones of the human soul, resonating with progressive, playful, groovy expressions on guitar, Sami frame drum, violins and sound design. These are vocal and percussion rituals updated for the 21st century. New music, created out of our most ancient traditions. Joikscapes of a sub-urban coastal Sami.
Please, experience Joiks of friendship and feminine power, death and love, darkness and pollution, stone labyrinths and drifting wood at the Arctic coastline. Experience the most powerful things in nature. Experience voodoo against Arctic oil drilling. Experience the world view of indigenous peoples as a key to change the world. Nature is not an enemy, but a friend. Bring out the good now, for the best in the future.
All of us become part of the concert. The room is explored together. There is interaction between the artists and everybody who is present. Traditional borders between stage and audience room disappear. The spaces between the thoughts get larger. Doors to different worlds open up. Let cruelty sleep for a while. Super naive. Super smart. VASSVIK.
VASSVIK
Vassvik is the crew around mastermind Torgeir Vassvik. The Sami musician, Joik artist and composer was born and raised in Gamvik, Sápmi/Norway and now lives mainly in Oslo. His first and main instrument is the voice in all its facets, based on the Sami Joik. He grew up with the mandolin music of his father, trained himself on the guitar, played in indie rock bands, uses prepared guitars, bass, munnharpe, flutes, horns and the Sami frame drum.
Stahl Stenslie
Stahl Stenslie is an artist, curator and researcher, specializing in experimental art, embodied experiences and disruptive technologies. His research and practice focus on the art of the recently possible – such as panhaptic communication, somatic sound and holophonic soundspaces, and disruptive design for emerging technologies. In 1993 he built the cyberSM experiment, the first tactile, cybersex communication system in the world. He has been exhibiting and lecturing at major international events (ISEA, DEAF, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH) and moderated symposiums like Ars Electronica (Next Sex), ArcArt and Oslo Lux. He represented Norway at the first Ichihara Biennial, Japan, the 5th biennial in Istanbul, Turkey, co-organized 6cyberconf and won the Grand Prize of the Norwegian Arts Council. As a publisher he is the editor of EE – Experimental Emerging Art magazine (eejournal.no), he has written numerous scientific articles and co-founded The Journal of Somaesthetics (somaesthetics.aau.dk). His PhD on Touch and Technologies (virtualtouch.wordpress.com).
Portrait Photograph (VASSVIK): Alex Bruun.
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / FeLT, OsloMet @ K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst /
Artist conversations May 7 / Curator: Kristin Bergaust & Hege Tapio
HEGE TAPIO / ANNIE HÄGG / FRANK EKEBERG / MAREN DAGNY JUELL / MARIA CASTELLANOS / MARIUS PRESTERUD
About the event
FeLT in collaboration with a selection of artists participating in the Ecophilia exhibition at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst and TEKS.studio invite you to reflect and debate on topics raised by the artworks in the exhibition: questioning relations and connections that occur between human beings, other living beings and machines in our time of ecological crises. How do we understand ourselves when borders between nature, humans and technology have become blurred, even obsolete?
About FeLT – Futures of Living Technologies
FeLT is an artistic research project funded by NARP based at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at OsloMet. FeLT is a transdisciplinary environment questioning, speculating and experimenting with how we sense life in the environment, in other beings and ourselves in an existence being constantly enhanced by technology.
We are currently working on the following themes:
Making with-sympoiesis: multispecies communication and co-creation
Practices of communication and co-creation with living organisms – such as microorganisms, plants or animals – might involve working with technologically complex systems as well as agriculture or indigenous knowledges and traditions. To rethink interspecies relations in the framework of a climate emergency moment can form new, entangled multispecies alliances.
Living technologies: living environments, humans, machines, intelligence, life and emotions
By the term living technology we think of the complex structures and functions of living organisms which have entered the hybrid and synthetic technologies. By including critical perspectives on the merging of technology and areas involving emotions, sensing and empathy, we question possible and speculative convergences of machine technology, artificial life, artificial intelligence and human bodies.
Sensorium: how we experience, interpret and develop applied aesthetics today
In order to reconnect with the environment, we are expanding the senses technologically inside and outside of institutions. Technologies continuously provide new ways of filtering our experiences and different means of relating to the living environment. Aesthetics today are also affected by perceptual complexity, relating to experiences that transcend art and include a vast array of both natural and constructed environments. Can the sensorium as an expanded aesthetics provide new modalities for connecting with natural resources? What new opportunities exist for interaction and how do technologies extend and provide explorative possibilities within sensations? And, in what way do institutions understand and relate to this sensory complexity as a sustainable choice?
Participants: a selection of artists participating in the Ecophilia exhibition at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst and TEKS.studio, FeLT-members and guests.
Moderators: Kristin Bergaust, FeLT project leader; Hege Tapio, Ph.D. fellow at OsloMet; and Maria Castellanos, postdoc at OsloMet, artist exhibiting at Ecophilia exhibition.
Header graphics: “Symbiotic Interaction” by Maria Castellanos.