Author: HiØ-NTA
Extract of the ARF brochure – about BS
This presentation was cancelled due to the unexpected sickness of Karen Kipphoff.
Mashgal – MA project in Bergen
First Production on stage
Towards the stage production
From 19 February to 4th March 2017, BLIND SPOT will meet (for the second time) in BERLIN at HZT/ Universität der Künste Berlin.
The artists involved until now are : Marcio Carvahlo, Carole Nadeau, Trond Lossius, Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, Karen Kipphoff, Karoline Skuseth, and Nik Haffner. To this group has been added 2 more artists: Ingvild Holm, Farid Fairuz,
This workshop will lead to the next session (and final) period of (performative) work which will take place in Fredrikstad during a whole month residency mid July – mid August 2017. The production/performance will be presented on 14th August 2017 in the Akademi (Norwegian Theatre Academy).
Bow and Arrow Season
Waiting — Hunting — Shadow — Monster
Field work at Wolletzsee outside Berlin during the workshop proved to be particularly productive. A former hunting ground for the DDR Stasi elite, this field trip produced compelling imagery and sound recordings with rich metaphorical resonances, including the stark contrasts between the peaceful landscape and the violent act of killing that it affords, silence and explosions, hunter and the hunted, surveillance, spying, voyeurism, fencing in and out at the edges and borders between fields and forests, etc.
Writing exercises
She is... She is sitting in the sports hall on a bench. She is exhausted after hours of cleaning. They will arrive in a couple of hours, in a bus, from the south. They might have travelled for more than three weeks. She is sitting on the bench and taking of her rubber gloves. She is drawing in her calendar while listening to a podcast about Portuguese cooking. She is drawing small patterns without really giving form to anything. She’s drawing in her calendar. It is the 4th of July 2016. She is soon of on holidays. She is online. She is considering where to go. She is googling travels to Angola and parallel watching a Netflix series about the Colombian mafia. She is lying on the sofa watching the news. A car crashes on the street. She is online, again. She is measuring her shadow: in the morning, at noon, in the early evening. It is summer. She is writing a letter to her grandmother. She is writing an email to her grandmother.
He looks at... He looks at the recorder, checking settings. Is it recording at all channels, as supposed to? No. Shit. Do I have to wade through all hundred and four sub-menues in order to reset this?, he thinks. This is fucking useless. The recorder is really nice when it works, but setting it up is a nightmare. Designed by engineers. Designed by a pedantic technical mind that starts out by systematically listing and then displaying all configuration options that were ever added to the firmware, including the useless features invented in a late Friday afternoon haze. And of course, the one tiny detail missing, the one they never got to, was a simple stupid preset storage. Why would you want that? Five furious minutes later. The LEDs are finally blinking as supposed to. As far as he can tell it is now configured correctly. But the place itself has been deconfigured in the process. The state that he has to bring himself into in order to do recordings that he can engage with later on, is gone. Depending on his mood, the world has more or less colours. Now the light is harsh, and erase the colours, leaving only white and bleak shades of gray and beige. The cables has gotten entangled. Can we please invent wireless electricity? Like now? Thanks. The perception of the place, shadowed by technology and bad-tempered moods.
She looks at... A huge box with holes in it He thinks it is a mountain because of the dust covering it She wanders what’s in the box But he doesn’t care for a mountain is only a mountain Another woman is standing there, she walks a little and then climb the mountain and sit on the dusty box Without warning As soon as she sat, the box mountain strangely and imperceptibly disappeared SHE But after a while she saw that it was still there but more to the right No more dust but papers seemed to be filling it He didn’t even notice it had changed place and had some kind of content He thought it was some kind of new construction , maybe a supermarket he thought Because he wasn’t giving it any attention, so he didn’t notice all the papers The woman who first sat walk again, whistling and went into this without warning
But what she doesn't see... But what she doesn't see is black, pink, green and the dirty leaves of sound floating up from the trashcan where it all began. the startup and its wonderful, wonderful wonderful greasy, greasy, greasy greasy green grey blue white song of gentle insistence. But what she didn't see was herself nor did she see the others nor did she see the city, the trucks, the planes overhead or the worms sliming creeping underneath the newspaper screaming screaming screaming the computer humming humming humming the doors slamming slamming creaking and slamming the dust spreading all over in a grey brown red cloud growing, growing, growing steadily and covering, blanketing coughing away the green leaves. But what she didn't see was flat, square, round, she only saw the stripy, green, dustbrown can, container on the other side of what she thought and din't see. But what she didn't see and did see at once was some pile of melon on an icy frosty cold november day piled by caucasian men who drove thousands of watermelon in old grey brown trucks all the way from georgia to violently smash them on the wide open square of taganskaja station. what she didn't see was berlin the suburb of moscow.
They look at... They look at each other and they didn't knew where to start They were in pairs, they were in Paris They looked at each other and realize how difficult it was to loose the ownership of their own bodies They didn't even look They though they were looking and decided to describe They saw it together They didn't payed attention How awful is to be tricked by your own reflection They looked and they are still looking. I stop looking, because they are looking at me So we can look at this without having the same eyes, is that what you saying? They looked again at each other and hoped somebody would save them from their own wills They had no patient and no wish to keep looking at that perfect white wall They knew all the time, and they never said it out loud They look and by not finding they assumed it existed They looked and looked and looked and looked, until they got sleepy They were dreaming that they have seen it somewhere They forgot what they have seen They were we shortly after one of them left the room The space... The space seems to hide the only thing that makes it visible The space seems to avoid speaking about what we don't see As we proceed without vision The space seems to unlearn us while we think we've seen enough We are at the beginning, The space seems to invite us to be audience although we are on stage, although we keep convincing ourselves that shadows are only in relation to illuminated things The space seems a to unthink, unlearn, unknown, unbelieve, unhunt at all The space seems a hunting cabin, a treat, and then it doesnt, specially after yesterday when i experienced the same cabin in the middle of Alexanderplatz The space seems to bring my eyes closer to myself, it borrows other lenses showing light as negative, like the negative effect in photoshop The space seems to invade other space, and pervert it, because it is obsessed by shaping its own shadow The space seems to be a waiting room, that builds expectations on how much time we can still pretend we are the audience In the end The space seems to lack shadows but the show goes on
Notes
Optics, from the concrete meaning — to the metaphorical and open
Space that has been emptied, deserted
Migrant — structure of society — infrastructure
Hunter and hunted
Shadow and light – seen and unseen
Devices and instruments
Representations
Waiting — orientation — voyeurism
Waiting — hunting — shadow — monster
Doubt — acceptance
We live in a bow and arrow season era,
current order will break down at some point.
Bow and arrow season as title, direction, pre-apocalyptic,
has tension and suspense, is scar
On the Sociological Psychology of the Hole
“The most important things are done through tubes. Proof: genitals, pens, and guns.” – Lichtenberg
The hole is a permanent companion of the non-hole;
I’m sorry, but there is no such thing as a hole by itself.
If there were something everywhere, there would be no holes, but there wouldn’t be any philosophy either, not to mention religion, which is holey in origin.
A mouse couldn’t exist without a hole, nor could man. It is the final salvation for both when they are hard-pressed by matter.
A hole is always a Good Thing.
The strangest thing about a hole is its edge.
It’s still part of the Something, but it constantly overlooks the Nothing—a border guard of matter.
Nothingness has no such guard; while the molecules at the edge of a hole get dizzy because they are staring into a hole, the molecules of the hole get… firmy?
There’s no word for it. For our language was created by the Something people; the Hole people speak a language of their own.
The hole is static.
There are no traveling holes.
Almost not .
Holes that are marrying each other become one of their own.
Separate the partition between two holes, does the right edge then belong to the left hole, or the left to
the right, or everybody to itself, or everybody to everybody ?
I’d like to have my worries.
When a hole is filled up, where does it go ?
Will it push itself to the side, right into the material ?
Or will it run to see another hole and tell him about his misery ?
Where does the filled hole remain ?
Nobody knows.
Here, our knowledge … has one.
Where something is, nothing else can be.
Where one hole is , can there be another one ?
And why aren’t there any half-holes ?
Some things lose value because of a single small hole:
because in a part of them there is a “no-thing”, all the rest isn’t worth anything anymore.
Example: a ticket, a virgin, a balloon.
The thing itself still has to be looked for:
the hole itself already is.
One that would be with one foot in a hole and the other foot with us, this one alone would be truly wise.
But no one has been able to achieve this yet.
Some megalomaniacs pretend that the hole is a negative thing. That is not right!
The human being is a not-hole and the hole is primary.
Do not laughole! The hole is the only premonition of paradise down here. When you’re dead, you’ll first realize what life is about.
Kurt Tucholsky 1931
The Panorama
The panorama seeks to present everything: the sum of all possible details to be seen, while at the same time keeping an overview, giving a general impression of that which is represented. But evermore accessible information cannot patch over the quintessential misunderstanding, that information accessible is not equal to filtering, reading, understanding, let alone acting upon that information.
The panorama will be an important audio-visual element in the production, drawing on previous work with panoramic image and video in collaborations between Karen Kipphoff and Trond Lossius, making use of non-standard wide screen video formats and immersive surround sound serving as auditive scenography.
Staged Bodies, media installation (2005-06)
by Karen Kipphoff & Trond Lossius