PLAY
is a piece combining improvised interpretations of an audio score made from two recorded performances of the live radio play In Labour, which is a live transmission of Motland’s voice and her sonic surroundings as she moves between outdoor and indoor spaces, in this case at Inderøya in Norway, and in Athens, Greece. The voice accompanies the environments as a sub-, back- and front layer, with the attempt of bringing the audience closer to something and suggesting that the performer and it’s surroundings could play equal parts in a narrative. The duality of the voice and surroundings, makes the framework for this radio version of in Labour, and is presented for improvising musicians as a score to interpret. The musicians are treating the timbres, pitches and timing of the recordings as indicators of how and when to play, adding new layers of musicality to the intimacy of the voice and the theatricality of the sonic sceneries.
Credits:
Rebecca Lane - Flute
Morten J. Olsen - Grand Cassa
Andrea Neumann - Inside Piano
GAD* Technologies by Marija Bozinovska Jones and J G Biberkopf
PLAY
GAD* is a concept initiated by Marija Bozinovska Jones who through her hybrid embodiment MBJ Wetware examines media ecologies and architectures as open biological systems. For Radio Labs, she invites J G Biberkopf as an avatar collaborator; together they premier GAD Technologies at the 2016 edition of Club Transmediale in form of a diffused spatial performance. They consecutively produce a radio play for Deutschlandradio Kultur aired in March 2016.
* gad (verb) - to move from one location to another in an apparently random and frivolous manner
* GAD is an abbreviation of General Anxiety Disorder
GAD Technologies engages with the concept of liquidity in an era of amplified technocapitalism and complex geopolitics. Creating simulations of non-places as virtual landscapes, GAD approaches subjects ranging from fluid identities and diffused nationalities within networked capitalism, to dromological state of existence and speculations on future scenarios.
It draws on “deterritorialization” as liquified cultural globalization aided by the effect of
informational hypercirculation. In the virtual realm where nationality, gender, position and race are symbolic and arbitrary, cultural and national subjectivity become divorced from the constraints of locality. Disembodied identities devoid of national representation become fluid as the state of existence perpetually accelerates.
With omnipresent technology the citizenship of the liquid state allows for free mobility across borders while swimming through oceans of information, however in waters that are murky, unclear, intransparent. Engaging in digital capitalism work blends with play; the data produced and consumed gets analyzed and monetized, behaviors predicted and conditioned.
The citizens of the liquid state are being pulled between two polarities: one where the limits seemed washed away with promise of democracy and the other where they are being continuously reestablished via algorithmic rule governed by the coupling of economy and political agencies.
We find ourselves in transit, floating in ambivalent waters between the two currents of freedom and control of planetary scale computation. How do we preserve our autonomy and sovereignty while being entangled in an opaque power structures' apparatus?
Our bodies are in transit, shifting between their physical subjectification and virtual representation; our bodily fluids circulate, maintaining feedback with our environment – systems within systems engaged in mimicry. Everything appears in perpetual state of flux and flow between aggregate states.
In psychoanalysis perpetual change and uncertainty is considered to lead to loss of control of the internal world often contributing to mental disorders; it is acknowledged as an unreciprocated mental investment.
Eastern philosophy offers a positive redefinition of change in terms of flexibility - as opening new possibilities. As the global South leaks into the global North and the local amalgamates the global, impermanence becomes a condition to be accepted. The transnational macrocosm consolidates the personal microcosm initiating new non solid meta narratives. Can we embrace liquidity without drowning?
Links:
CTM Festival
Deutschlandradio Kultur
SHAPE
