Scoring Perspectives for Speculative Ethnography

Cluster Members Maxime le Calvé and Yoonha Kim are delighted to invite you to two days of stretching senses school workshops on 24th & 25th of November with Dorte Bjerre Jensen at the Cluster and in the Kunstgewerbemuseum at the Design Lab 13#: Material Legacies exhibition.

Exhibition-as-research: November 24,10:00 am - 17:00 pm Central Laboratory, MoA, Sophienstr. 22a, 10178 Berlin, with an interactive performance at the exhibition Designlab13#: Material Legacies at Kunstwerbemuseum.

Hybrid interactions: November 25, 10:00 am - 17:00 pm: Central Laboratory, MoA, Sophienstr. 22a, 10178 Berlin.

The two workshops will help us push forward our collective experiments in speculative ethnography and research-as-exhibition. We will bring together bodies and spaces into motion, and evaluate the potentials of an interdisciplinary practice of »scoring« to explore, describe and analyze in first-person the activity of images, spaces, and materials based on the micro-phenomenological method (see Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, Bitbol & Petitmengin 2017).

Both workshops will be based on the performative score »Sharing Perspective«

The performative score »Sharing Perspectives« is an interactive piece and artistic research practice staging exploration and improvisation. The performative score »Sharing Perspectives« explores uncertainty, creativity, togetherness, perspectives and the relationship in-between bodies and between bodies and space. This performance builds upon choreography as a technology of scoring (Lepecki 2012). If applied in a receptive space, scores may bring resources, feelings, attitudes, and modes of attending to the surface (O'Connor 2019; Lepecki 2006). In this way scores act as interventions that allow people to be together exploring a living body in plural, continually shaped and reshaped. The performative score »Sharing Perspectives« is art practice that acts as a collaborative research experience, where a group of people are guided to move through space on their own and together, exploring encounters, sharing perspectives and attending to the vibrant space around themselves as well as between each other.

The piece »Sharing Perspectives« was a part of the art/science research collaboration, Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), consisting of researchers and artists from the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin. As part of EER, dancer, choreographer, performance artist and researcher Dorte Bjerre Jensen developed performative scores that unfolded and depicted decision-making and perspective-taking. »Sharing Perspectives« was performed in relation to the Olafur Eliasson exhibition »In Real Life« at the Tate Modern in London in November 2019, as part of the EER project.

The stretching senses school, an MoA project curated by Cluster anthropologists Yoonha Kim (Object Space Agency) and Maxime Le Calvé (Cutting), is an emerging learning community around immersive arts, creative coding, and speculative ethnography. It aims to explore more-than-human perceptions through making practices bringing in conversation various immersive media.

We will experiment and discuss the micro-phenomenological method, and discuss how it can help open an epistemic conversation space between anthropologists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, etc., and facilitate the harvest of first-person experience data.

Registration

Please sign up with an email at maxime.le.calve [​at​] hu-berlin.de

Schedule of the workshops

24.11.22 / Exhibition-as-research

Based on the »second-order« investigations of the Object Space Agency project, we will explore the method of »Sharing Perspectives« with the exhibition »Material Legacies« at Kunstgewerbemuseum, going through the exhibition with a partner following a defined protocol, and improvising playful attention duets. This deeper experience of the exhibition space will spark conversations and result in individual reports which we will document as a contribution to the exhibition.

10:00 am - 12:30 pm Matters of Activity - Cluster of Excellence

Introduction to scores, and exploration with the body and senses.

Work in two groups, creating small scores the groups can share with each other.

14:00 - 17:00 pm Kunstgewerbemuseum

Performance of SP at the Material Legacy exhibition, and sharing about the experience

25.11.22 / Hybrid Interactions

Contributing to the inquiry into “tactful interventions” of the Cutting project, we will use the notion of scores to build and expand on the virtual reality experiences created by the stretching senses school (based on the research at the cluster). This will bring us to expand virtual cutting outside the screen while hybridizing e further the interactions between bodies, space, and creative code.

10:00 am - 12:30 pm Matters of Activity - Cluster of Excellence

Warm-up and initiation to the micro-phenomenological method (short introduction to the theoretical framework, to micro-phenomenological interviews, and to data analysis)

14:00-17:00 pm Matters of Activity - Cluster of Excellence

Performance of SP with the stretching senses school VR works, sharing about the experience.

Bio

As a director, creator, choreographer, and performer, Dorte Bjerre Jensens work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of ecological attention through movement, manifested as performance, participatory performative scores, live art installations, workshops, and writing. In 2019, She joined the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. As part of EER, She performed my piece Sharing Perspectives (SP) at Tate Modern London. SP gave a rare insight into the world of the other by embodying another person’s perspective. As ways to navigate the pandemic, She developed the performative scores, Greeting Cards (2020), which questioned and redefined the choreographed gesture greeting; and INviteME Online (2021), which invited participants to reconnect to their private spaces, plants, and each other. She publishes these collaborations in both artistic and scientific books and journals.