Players: 1+ players
Duration: >20 minutes

About
This proposal explores alternative notions of intimacy and encounter by playing with presence, absence, and unconventional ways of communication and exchange through the modes of sound, listening, and bodily movement. The idea was developed in reaction to isolation and social distancing during the first wave of COVID-19, but is also inspired by continuous advances in communication technologies (particularly their ability to convey an illusion of proximity in disembodied encounters). Through exploring the possibilities of embodied communication within a networked digital environment, while excluding pictures and verbal language, nineteen artists from around the world produced sound messages created only by their voices. Sound scores accompanying this proposal have been composed from this collection of abstract sound expressions.

By inviting artists who are not singers or musicians to produce something audible—something that they might not be necessarily good at or used to doing—the project tries to break away from conventional forms of communication, allowing participants too, to make mistakes or deviate from the usual or expected. You are invited to listen to, and react upon the scores using your body and movement. This can be done by moving in any way that for you is an organic response to the sounds that you are hearing. If stillness is preferably for you, that is also an option. Maybe movements that are not predictably “beautiful”, synchronous or supported by familiar beats might encourage us to connect to our vulnerability that is always implicit in our attempts at being intimate with others.

Let the sound slip into your ears, spread throughout your body, and poke you into subtle or expressive movements, depending on your own reception, mood, and engagement!







Downloads

︎︎︎  STBW_About.pdf
︎︎︎  STBW_How-to-Play.pdf
︎︎︎  STBW_Tickets.pdf



Petra Mrša’s lens-based media work arises from initiating and facilitating situations that implement rule-based scenarios that takes art context as a site to broaden and challenge the experience of self. Through thought and physical experiments imposed on herself and/or collaborators, her art process opens up the space for creating new realities in which horizontality, radical hospitality, and the acceptance of the unknown shape interpersonal dynamics. Acquired embodied knowledge celebrates vulnerability and imagination while its documentation offers ground to connect to not just other humans but to other-than-human intelligences as well. Petra’s interest in broadening the behavior through self-imposed instructions brought her into a three years-long research on the video game medium that additionally served as a site to open a conversation about the mechanisms of socialization in virtual reality. As an artist and educator with a background in social science and art studies, her multidisciplinary and collaborative approach can be seen as a sustainable community research that joins the seek to repair the current damage and transforms the conditions of coexistence.

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