Is it possible to respond to the challenge of a philosopher with artistic means, rather than on the one hand by attempting to philosophize, or on the other hand by resorting to illustration or application? Perhaps it is not. This text is nevertheless an attempt at responding to the challenge posed to artists by Michael Marder who, in volume 1 of this journal, challenged philosophers and artists ‘to include the spatiality, movement, and perspective of the vegetal in their work’ (Marder 2015, 192). The artistic research project ‘Performing with plants’ could be understood as a response to this challenge. In this text I will briefly outline the plan for the project, relate it to the current interest in plant thinking, plant theory and new materialist feminist theory and then focus on some works loosely related to the project, which seem to resonate with Marder’s challenge in some sense. The variations of Resting with Pines performed in September 2017 in Nida Art Colony on the Curonian spit in Lithuania will serve as attempts to include and even emulate the vegetal, and as an example of a characteristic common to many performance practices, namely the tendency to go on, to ‘keep growing’.

Teatr Weimar is a performing arts collective founded in 2003 and located in Malmö, Sweden. The group brings together playwrights, directors, actors, musicians and other artists to explore the boundaries and expressive potential of contemporary performing arts. The works of the collective are syntheses of traditional and experimental theatre, new music theatre, concert music, radiophonic art, video art and sound installations. The approach and practice of integrating different art forms and genres are vastly diverse. This article will discuss a number of terms, concepts and methods that have emerged out of the body of works as essential tools for the collaborative artistic processes.

The art of circus is a vibrant and competitive culture that embraces new tools and technology. In this paper, a series of exploratory design processes resulting in proofs of concepts are presented, showing strategies for effective use of three different modes of sonic interaction in contemporary circus. Each design process is based on participatory studio work, involving professional circus artists. All of the proofs of concepts have been evaluated, both with studio studies and public circus performances, taking the work beyond theoretical laboratory projects and properly engaging the practice and culture of contemporary circus.The first exploration uses a contortionist’s extreme bodily manipulation as inspiration for sonic manipulations in an accompanying piece of music. The second exploration uses electric amplification of acoustic sounds as a transformative enhancement of existing elements of circus performance. Finally, a sensor based system of real-time sonification of body gestures is explored and ideas from the sonification of dance are translated into the realm of circus.

This thesis explores musical composition in the context of contemporary theatre. It suggests methods where compositional thinking – broadly understood – can be used as a dramaturgical device in the creation of theatre performances. Such musicalization of theatre provides new methods for an artistic practice and questions traditional artistic hierarchies and working structures.

   The investigation departs from a process of transference of radiophonic art to stage performances. From this a series of interdisciplinary works in the intersection between concert, theatre performance, radio play and music theatre has been created, each with different approaches to the roles and functions of musical composition. Through these works the creative processes and methods are examined and analysed.

   The notion of vertical dramaturgy and polyphony in theatre contexts is discussed and demonstrated, which pinpoints the significance of interaction between the elements of a performance. The interplay between dramatic writing, acting methods and musical composition is under scrutiny, as is the way in which visual elements as video, light and scenography are integrated into polyphonic theatre experiences. Transformation is an essential compositional and dramaturgical tool as it allows a performance to move seamlessly between different art forms, continuously creating new relationships.

   Through the research a model for interdisciplinary, collaborative work in performing arts emerges. The concepts of Shared space and Shared time are introduced and enable a collective ‘thinking-through-practice’ and expansion of the artistic roles. This joint arena of space and time opens up new connections, interactions and mutual exchanges between artists and art forms.

   The outcome provides a range of artistic methods in the field of contemporary intermedial theatre where musical composition is one of the dramaturgical devices for composing the performances.

The new audio technologies available today are forces in the evolution of sound and music in contemporary performing arts. New sonic practices for sound designers, composers and performers emerge, which in turn change the creative processes for productions, as well as the aesthetics of performances. This article focuses on how a creative rethinking of work with immersive sound, virtual room acoustics and sonic spatialization can be a dramaturgical, compositional and scenographic tool for performing arts. It is a new sonic practice that offers interactive and immersive elements that interplay with performers, transforms spaces and shapes evocative experiences for the audience. The article particularly considers the creative perspectives of the composer and the sound designer in how new ideas and possibilities may unfold with such an approach. This may ultimately merge the often-separated practices of musical composition and sound design and further expand them towards scenography and dramaturgy.

The idea of resonances and responses as a fundamental compositional principle is found in many of my compositions. I have used it in instrumental pieces both with and without electronics, in theatre contexts, in conceptual works and in intertextual and intermusical referential structures. In Terpsichord, a piece for percussion and pre-recorded sounds, the resonances from the acoustic instruments form sonic bridges to the pre-recorded electronic sounds, that, in turn, prolong the resonances, re-shaping them into new sonic gestures. A dialogue of actions and reactions is created that drives the trajectory of the music. The term resonance has its origins in acoustics and describes how a vibrating object creates sympathetic vibrations in other objects. It can also be used metaphorically to describe how something we hear or see can be set in motion within us, evoking associations or strong emotions, and how works of art are reinforced and reflected in other works with similar features. In this article I present examples from my own works discussing how resonances and responses are used in solo instrumental pieces with electronics, concerto works, as well as in theatre music works.

In classical music performance, if the only tool to sustain the great tradition may be seen to be perfectionism, it may hijack artistic expression and freedom. Possibly it will also limit the expressive potential of the performer. Taken together, the vast repertoire, the pressure to compete, and the institutional demands levied in order to make a career leave very little room for exploring new and radical parameters in performance or interpretation. ‘Potential space’ was Donald Winnicott’s term for an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others. This audio paper by Kent Olofsson and Francisca Skoogh is a sound composition focusing on portraying performance as a potential space, with interpretation as play material. In it, we hear Skoogh, a pianist with many years of experience performing Western classical music, express her performance values, i.e. how she manages emotions connected to expected behaviour on stage and to the repertoire. The authors proceed to transcribe Winnicott’s potential space into artistic practice in order to challenge both the relations between score and performer, and expected concert traditions. It explores one of the great sonatas of the piano repertoire, the Piano Sonata Op. 11 by Robert Schumann.

In this project I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I began the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured toall possible entities in the ecosystem I am a part of,from blueberries to colleagues to films. In the process I further explored how power structures are contested or confirmed in different kinds of imagemaking. How the relationship between human and environment is transformed and how animation practices offer me a wide variety when exploring and expanding that relationship.

A fan-fiction essay on the artistic and ecological possibilities in animation practices, from the mushroomcloud in Barefoot gen via the animation-stand to the ecosexual relationships in Asparagus.

A presentation of Elsa, the new climate calculator for the Swedish film industry that is used by filmmakers to make better decisions in their creative process. Through the climate calculator, the user can overview and report how much CO2 the film production emits.

Elsa is part of Lina Persson’s artistic research project and a collaboration between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and KTH.

En workshop om att gå i ide och hitta andra förhällningssätt till var klimatpåverkan. Vad händer i kroppen när vi sänker tempot? Hur kan en värld där alla resurskrävande handlingar balanseras och kompenseras se ut? I den här workshopen fär du ligga ner, slappna av och transporteras in i dvala.Meditationen ramas in av den fiktiva berättelsevärlden New Reactive Earth.

A report on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of Lina Persson’s artistic practice by Karin Lagercrantz. In this LCA six projects that Persson created within the framework of Climate-Just Worldings (C-J W) between 2019-2020 has been assessed. The purpose of this LCA is to measure and calculate what climate footprint Persson’s research project C-J W has.

The prompting of this quantitative method stems from the performative story-world that drives the C-J W project. The function of the LCA correlates with the basic mechanisms of the story-world’s time machine & cyborg-Gaia character. The results from the LCA will be fed back into the story-world as part of a continuous feedback between story development and everyday life interventions.

The quantitative methods in Persson’s artistic practice play a role in breaking with internalized and normalized outdated structures or unjust privileges. When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Therefore, it can be necessary to measure our behaviour in order to render our privileges visible as such. With this quantitative analysis we aim to bring forth a discussion of climate-justice in relation to artistic practices and productions. One concrete purpose with the LCA is to guide Persson in what she can do to reduce her emissions in future projects. It will support her in creating climate budgets and it will be the basis for templates for calculating emissions in her future practices.

Inför förslaget att genomföra ett strömavbrott, som ett led i Lina Perssons konstnärliga forskning vid Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, sammanställde fastighetschefen en konsekvensanalys från samtliga av högskolans avdelningar. Här är en sammanställning av den dessa konsekvensanalyser.

Redigerad fredag! Fem kvällar om undersökande publicering i OEI #79: redigera/publicera/distribuera!

Andra publiceringsvägar, andra publiceringsvärldar En kväll med undersökande svenska förlag och publiceringsstrukturer.

Utifrån skilda perspektiv och praktiker kommer gästerna att belysa och diskutera redaktionella strategier samt publiceringens kritiska potentialer, innovativa former och produktiva gemenskaper.

Redigerad fredag! lyfter fram en ekologi av konstnärliga publiceringsalternativ i Danmark, Sverige, Portugal och Frankrike för att lyssna till några av de samtida initiativ som alstrar ny energi inom redigering, publicering och distribuering.

Programmet gräver sig också bakåt i den alternativa publiceringens historier. Där finns bland annat Ernesto de Sousas genreutmanande arbete som kritiker, konstnär, filmare och curator under de portugisiska 1960-, 70- och 80-talen, och det svenska Kulturmagasinet Vargen (1974–1975) med dess egensinniga mix av dada, pop och anarkism.''

En kväll med ett fyrverkeri av 7 undersökande svenska förlag och publiceringsstrukturer: Art Distribution (Percival), BILAGA (Mari Lagerquist och Lina Persson), Chateaux (Beata Berggren, Martin Högström och Peter Thörneby), Firework Edition (Leif Elggren och Thomas Liljenberg), Mount Analogue (Diana Kaur och Tris Vonna-Michell), tillexempel förlag (Kristian Carlsson) och Rönnells förlag (Pekka Särkiniemi).

Presentationer, performancer, releaser, samtal, möten.

Programserien ingår i nummer 79 av tidskriften OEI som publiceras som en rumslig presentation på museet.

OEI #79: Redigera/publicera/distribuera! 

This panel will present different ways of conceptualizing multispecies and storytelling. It aims at investigating the rhetoric of nonhuman subjectivity and thereby highlighting a specific form of interaction that takes place while detecting organic multitude. We hold that through assenting a nonhuman subjectivity, we are able to identify, recognize and reify multitude. While human subjectivity is created through inter-human actions, such as communication, narration and storytelling, we cannot assume that nonhuman subjectivity is formed in the same way. In order not to see only our human-selves in nonhuman interaction, we will propose an investigative, dialectic and inclusive platform for perceiving nonhuman subjectivity. Understanding any form of discourse as a process of dialectics, we can only reach an understanding for nonhuman subjectivity by merging different artistic as well as academic practices. We believe this process to be interdisciplinary, reaching over into activism, politics and ideology, and thus forcing a future-orientated discourse into being that includes nonhuman subjecthoods. Our theoretical base is founded on thinkers such as Judith Butler, Louis Althusser and Donna Haraway, while our practices include fine art, still photography, digital video and computer games. The presentation will be performed as one organic body comprised of three researching organs producing a two limbs and appendage creature.   

Livscykelanalys (LCA) av Lina Perssons konstnärliga praktik utförd av Karin Lagercrantz. I denna LCA har sex projekt som Persson skapat inom ramen för Climate-Just Worldings (C-J W) mellan 2019-2020 utvärderats. Syftet med denna LCA är att mäta och beräkna vilket klimatavtryck Perssons forskningsprojekt C-J W har.  

Return of the silurians – en improvisation mellan en ljudpraktik och en rörlig bildpraktik av Lina Persson, Forskare i film och Jenny Sunesson, Lektor i audiell mediaV

I installationen Return of the Silurians gestaltas olika steg av återupplivande, re-animation. Under en fem timmar lång improvisation experimenterar Persson och Sunesson med en berättelsevärld med höjda havsnivåer och ökade temperaturer, där människa och natur är en odelbar helhet. Genom att tillsammans analysera lager av ljud och lager avsediment/berggrund improviserar de fram en gestaltning.

This article is discussing and presenting insights gained through the research project To let things unfold (by catching the centre) conducted by Jan Burkhardt and Cecilia Roos between 2016-2018 and financed by Stockholm University of the Arts. The research started with the pilot study Gestures of exchange from a shared interest in how performers exchange methods during an artisticprocess and our aim was to explore different ways of articulating that. During that study we realized that our interest was rather in howwe can experience each other’s methods through sensation. That brought us into To let things unfold (by catching the centre),where we have been working on expanding the notions of sensation and practicing different ways that experiences of sensation can be used as a material in choreographic processes. The questions we have asked ourselves are: What is the role of sensation inchoreographic processes? In what ways are sensations exchanged, transformed and transacted between performers in a creativeprocess? What kind of possibilities can emerge out of purposelessness? The act of sharing became our primary research practice supported by sensation as one of the fundaments for sharing.

Listening to the forest is a streamed video essay in which you are invited to pay attention to audiovisual relations between human, landscape and moving image. Moving images are explored through a camera-based field recording practice that emphasises them as part of an ecological materiality, inseparable from what they depict and how they are seen.

Rendering a forest as a visual site, a landscape, while collaborating with it in developing sounds and images, the essay explores how human management is inseparable from the conditions of the forest itself. It engages with Swedish forestry and its ecological consequences, and with the precariousness of relations between human and non-human through practices of attention (Ingold, 2015) and listening (Voegelin, 2012). Nature appears as compromised through plantation and its consequences, and at the same time as a cinematic collaborator, enabling the relationships that produce the images, relations between the life of the forest, bodies, and devices.

In a similar gesture the images are also treated as a site, not separate from the relations of the world it is depicting, but part of its ongoing processes and emerging in a network of interactions (Røed, 2014). Drawing upon the long history of framing in cinema (Gunning, 1994), the video plays with stillness and movement, panoramic motion, algorithmic automation, topographical thinking as well as structural strategies such as juxtaposition. For example, a split between juxtaposed images breaks the spatiality of the image as well as the verticality of the forest’s tree trunks while expanding the visual field, allowing the trunks to stretch further up, out of one visual field and into the next.

By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art (Voegelin, 2014; Benson & Montgomery, 2018) and applying it to the moving image, this research explores the capacity of video-based art for enabling movement, transience, and body; in other words, elements of performance characteristic to site (Kwon 2004, Kaye 2000). By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, it explores how the moving image can manifest as place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.

In a context of artistic practice, I ask how activities of listening and paying attention occurring through the moving image can be applied as a specific methodology to explore specific surroundings and to create artworks that operate across any dialectic opposition between experience, mediation, and representation, as a form of placemaking? Leaving behind phenomenological appreciation of being immersed in a natural world andbreaking with the aesthetics of the avant-garde, where the materiality of the medium is in a separate position disconnected from the relations of the world, the essayseeks to share a methodology where research occurs in a thick materiality through the situated practice of video art as it developed as a form of inquiry. (Bijvoet, 1997)

A speculative story-world that drives transformation of stories and future realities. Through existing technologies and research, it proposes how future generations could hypothetically confront the present with its overdraft of resources and push back this current colonisation of the future and open up for possible transformations of the present. In this story-world, future generations has, thanks to Mallets time technology, hacked the present so that the earth system updated herself into a New Reactive Earth, a cyborg gaia.

A conscious reactive earth that monitors and regulate how all inhabitants use resources & life-space. The motivation behind this fiction story-world came out of a general longing for a more sustainable life and art practice and was concreticized through the collaboration with professor in physics Ronald Mallet. It was then further developed through methods of speculation, embodied worldbuilding and rule based frameworks limiting access to energy and resources. The project crosses genre with documentary in how it experiments with ways for acting out the story-world premises in real life situations, drafting sustainable transitions in all kinds of situations and contexts.

In relation to specific contexts, Elsa - The new reactive Earth, register specific amounts of outlets of carbon dioxide equivalents. (according to calculations by www.elsa.com). To balance this account participants are guided to go into hibernation for a specific time period.

Custom made carbon calculator for the artistic practice of Lina Persson. The calculator is based on the life cycle assessment of six artistic projects carried out between 2019-2021, as part of the artistic research project Climate-Just Worldings.

Research poster summarizing the research project that explores new perspectives in world-building for film in a hypothetical future climate-just world, combining artistic narrative methods with quantitative methods and resource limitations. 

Return of the Silurians stages four different phases of resurgence, re-animation. From dead petrified fossils to soft clay imprints, to animated clay. It investigates the Silurian coral reef organisms as humanity’s ancestors and potential future descendants. 

Som ett led I Lina Perssons forskningsprojekt  Climate-Just Worldings genomfördes en livscykelanalys av SKH’s examensfilmer 2021. Forskningsingenjör Karin Lagercrantz följde, dokumenterade och beräknade klimatavtrycket för filmstudenternas produktioner under vårterminen 2021. Detta är utvärderingen av hur studenterna upplevde denna process.