Fieldworking art-science: a tour of the “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary with EER
Two weeks ago, I was invited in Copenhagen by the EER project (Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting; Olafur Eliasson Studio + Interacting Mind Center at Aarhus University) to conduct a graphic ethnographic intervention at an idea-seeding experimental workshop. Our stay there started with a tour of the newly opened “Yet, it moves!” exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, an ambitious art-science project that a number of EER members helped develop, curated by fantastic curator Irene Campolmi, featuring the work of the fabulous Helene Nymann, and the wizard anthropologist Joe Dumit working his good spells in the background.
In a low-key synchronicity event prefiguring some of the motion-driven mystics of the afternoon’s theme, I bumped into my new colleagues on the bus to the exhibition after a difficult train trip. The exhibition space opened recently at an ancient shipyard at the end of the bus lines. Crowds were converging there for CopenHell, a festival for heavy metal lovers. Curator Irene Campolmi opened with a line by Galileo, using a famous sentence of his as a lever, catapulting us instantly to speed: “The earth is in the center of the universe, and yet it moves!” The show brings the visitors to an estranging encounter with the perception worlds of modern science, stretching from the cosmos to the brain and back. At the tip of the artists’ fingers, science data and imaginations of matter commit with each other into cosmic assemblages. They all usher us onto a moving map of what we are in their various ways. The movement of the world – and us in it – becomes the foundation of purpose and cause, cutting together apart the lab and the studio. On the left of the sketch, one can see the piece Helene Nymann created for the show: a sculpture on a pink podium adorned with a QR code etched on brass; a video, and an inquiring web device. That work wants the visitors to remember what to remember. Their remembrances are then located on the “carte de tendre.”
There is a heavy orb in the lobby that moves smoothly. Try and set it in motion: the model of the world becomes an empty form that takes meaning only through the dynamic flows of perspective it enables. “Try to get the orb or yourself moving – through movement, you might discover new knowledge.” The pulsations inside us are brought in direct continuity with the vibrance of the universe. Dorte reaches for the binoculars and sets her gaze in motion – a shivering focus can bring things to dance again.
Datastreams flood through us in the ultra-high-definition audio-video installation of Ryoji Ikeda. The piece Dataverse is displayed in a huge room on three panes, three acts of a spacetime opera shown simultaneously with bombastic data sound triggering macroscopic unfoldings of picture matters throughout cosmos bodies. The feeling of awe turned us momentaneously into a Wagnerian audience process, sitting on the hard floor in the dark. A few members of EER, more inclined to keep moving, probed the work very close up, meeting with the pixels and disrupting the illusion.
The next piece was also monumental as a projection of monumental proportions. It showed us the inside of a glacier’s “throat” shortly before its collapse. Jakob Kudsk Steensen scanned the mighty being and presents video footage, points, and meshes, juxtaposing them into an intricate inner landscape. “My parents were mountaineers,” a subtitle told us as the subwoofers hummed deep subglacial tones. Everything else was dark save for the doorstep to the next enlightening experience.
The next piece was the much expected carte de tendre “Futur Continuous” video poetic piece of Helene Nymann. “Maybe the future is a memory you can remember, something you don’t want to be repeated.” “It’s time to draw a new map.” Situating us into an emotion landscape was an innovation of a female writer in the 17th century: together with friends, they invented a way to place the itinerary of a love journey. Helene crops out the map with a generative AI to remember the future of our human voyage. She stages herself and others into a dark loving affair with our grim perspectives and what we will leave ahead of us. What we will remember of the future. “Try to remember how your memory will make the future feel.”
The last piece of the show is a thinking bowl. The “Brain Pond” by Jenna Sutela is inviting the visitors to touch its rims and the water is keeps. A microphone picks the sound of it, mixed with sounds of prior interactions and whales and cosmos. The sound is not as “live” as the intrically written concept announces it, which makes the piece if yet interactive perhaps more uniformoulsy evocative of cosmic ripples and neural sparks. Kids love to touch its ears, Irene tells us, and we touched and tried to get the heavy brass bowl to sing.
“Yet, it moves!” points at the rich experiential world of science. Movement is one of the ways It is be deeply erroneous to think science worlds as disenchanted and waiting for the intervention of the artist or humanity scholar to reenchant them, as Natasha Myers points out in her ethnographic notes on how biologists encounter plant-sensing (2015). Much like the popular physics writing on quantum in the 1980s and 1990s, this exhibition pays attention to the emergence of new contemporary languages to articulate mystic experiences between science and art, into slightly grim future that still believe in human potential.
Writing Fieldwork with Chat-GPT: An Ethnographic Report "in the style of Anton Chekhov"
“I saw everything, so it is not a question of what I saw, but how I saw.” Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexei Suvorin, SS Baikal, Tartar Strait,September 11, 1890 (2008)
I present here a series of graphic field notes drawn on site during the 'Driving the Human' event at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” on May 10, 2023, along with ethnographic text co-written with ChatGPT. One of my favorite books on ethnographic writing practice suggests that the best companion for writing ethnography would be Anton Chekhov, who in his pioneering work on Sakhalin Island intended to write with “scientific and literary purposes in mind”. (Narayan 2012 : 3) Using an AI and prompting it to write 'in the style of Anton Chekhov' made me feel like I was partnering up with the great playwright —or almost so. Sometimes I had to edit a lot, sometimes I had to let in a few sentences that clearly showed that a non-human intelligence was at work. Chekhov would approve this mode of sketching things up, as shows this excerpt from a letter to his brother in 1899: “Don’t smooth out the rough edges, don’t polish; be clumsy and bold. Brevity is the sister of talent.”(2008) If the accidental lyricism of the IA works well with this motto, it also plays around a current limit that the Russian writer also recognized as his: As he wrote to a friend in another letter dating from 1897, uncannily relating to the state of ChatGPT at the moment: “My sins are unintentional because, as I am only now beginning to understand, I do not yet know how to write longer pieces.”(2008) Together with my drawings, the "taste of the hand" and the flavor of the AI combine to create — I hope— a reading experience as joyful as its making.
Read the essay there: https://stretchingmaterialities.pubpub.org/pub/ds0pgumg
Taking a break from/as fieldwork
Fieldwork in the art-science VR scene: Sophie Erlund & the Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting group @PSM Gallery
Yesterday at the PSM Gallery in Schöneberg (Berlin), Sophie Erlund was presenting half a day of workshop and presentations around her VR piece Nature is an event that never stops. She has been working on that piece for the last six months, and it will be on display until 25.02.2023. It’s fantastic, definitely worth a trip to this part of the city where a cluster of galleries is established, on the opposite side of the canal from the Neue Nationalgalerie.
The artwork is a collaboration with the EER group, a mixed bunch of scientists and artists interested in playful approaches to inquire into perception. They offer pathways between cognitive science and installation art, using a “French” method to conceive and evaluate these hybrid setups: microphenomenology. The cognitive scientist Katrin Heimann interviewed visitors and presented her first conclusions in the first part of the workshop in text-heavy slides. She invited us to close our eyes as she channeled the experiences “in first-person” that she had collected. In the second part, Karsten Olsen presented his work on “cultural transmission,” the cognitive mechanism that is explored in the piece by Sophie Erlund. How are sketches or colors transformed as they are memorized and transmitted?
Microphenomenology is the child of the philosopher Claire Petitmengin. The method is elaborating on a technique called the “elicitation interview” which was invented by Pierre Vermersch (1994) and further developed in collaboration with Nathalie Depraz and Francisco Varela as a “phenomenological practice” in the book On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing (2003). It is a delicate practice, a deep dive of the interviewer and the interviewee into the sensations and thoughts that occurred during a targeted experience. Claire Petitmengin has conducted research in contemplative science for the last 30 years. The method she teaches indeed shares many principles with meditation, evolving self-inquiry into interpersonal approaches. The method came to me in a new light influenced by the work of EER member Joe Dumit: what if we took it as a contact improvisation exploration inside and around a phenomenon? That day, we centered the interpersonal perceptive field on the lived experience of unprepared visitors going through the VR “film” of Sophie Erlund.
The final panel featured the artists Sophie Erlund and Helene Nymann, the neuroscientist, poet, and brain activist Pireeni Sundaralingam, and the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Andreas Roepstorff. It was introduced by Helena Herzberg, the art manager of PSM Gallery. The session was touching on many topics ranging from cognitive flexibility in school kids to funding schemes for art-science endeavors. Excellent both in content and shape, this two-hour conversation strokes a powerful chord. The participants took the context of EER and the production of the VR piece as a start. The focus went quickly to the serious political implication of bringing together in playful ways the knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and that of artists. Challenged by the audience, speakers stated the urgency of encouraging resistance against the pervading rigidity of the educating system, as well as the uncertainty-adverse societal context. Staging and sharing more-than-human perceptions, as Erlund does so masterfully in her VR film, is one of the many ways to champion tender attention to other people's experiences. As the EER member and play scholar Amos Blanton puts it in the end: bringing children and adults into creative exercises brings up the fears of failing and coming short. Yet the moment when they become engaged in the aesthetic activity, these fears dissolve and the joy of tinkering takes over. Hearing these words, I lifted up my head from my iPad for a short moment, reflecting on graphic ethnography and my experience of teaching ethnography through drawing. So much food for thought today, and great insights on how to frame an art-science VR experience. The panel, as well as the other interventions of the day, were documented and will be available soon on https://www.eer.info/
All the info is on the website of the gallery.
Sharing my sketchy fieldnotes on the spot with anthropologist colleague Andreas Roepstorff w/ ©Yoonha Kim, exchanging first-person impressions in embodied way at the end of the day.
Conference-as-fieldwork: EASA 2022 in Belfast
So happy to be in Belfast for a dip into our fleshy community of scholars! Ethnographers can’t help it, they attend conferences ethnographically. Here is a graphic report.
The ethnographer at work.
Sitting in the corner that will offer the clearest picture is more often than not a deliberate choice.