Some introducing thoughts… in words and images…

What else could nativeness and pre-objectiveness still tell us? The knowledge of Amazon tribes, imparted by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa and written with the words of Western Europeans by Bruce Albert, states that the Yanomami culture does not own books and libraries. Their “archive” is the existing Amazon world with all the symbolic meanings. Therefore, the loss of their habitat as the final effect of brutal deforestation and road building can be comparable to the loss of electricity, which maintains the parallel digital system and its vitality in Western civilization. The Voyager Golden Records containing an eclectic selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classical and traditional music, as well as other sounds selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, prove a narcissistic presumption about the existence of Other, capable of decoding the recorded messages. The landing of the space aircraft on the comet 67P/C-G proved that a space object is not mute but produces low-frequency sound waves. That gives scientists new insights into comets and help them learn how a completely unknown structure and substantiality travels through time and space.  A sound interactive project with the working title ” What else could we nativeness and pre-objectiveness still tell us?” is an open-source software application including a variety of digital photos which are through temporal periodicity converted into sound patterns. The latter turn into the basic sound material of the sequencer, which transmits the sound image to the listener via internet streaming. Digital photos, the frozen images of archeologic nano territory, where bio-habitat manifests its unyielding nature, transmit the reality into a digital code. The frozen image creates a distance towards its reality and transforms into a digital footprint. This particular kind of tautology serves as the “laboratory” isolation of data and its sonicity. This way an inverse structure of shaman reality is formed, which sounds its nature in a virtual internet structure. Via streaming, it reveals how the “insubstantiality” of digital information travels through time and space. As the distribution goes with the flow of the virtual dimension, its uniqueness is never archived. Our commitment to constant opening of our sound imagery and exposing it to a variety of intertwining actions within and beyond the human existence shows how fragile and complex are bonds that exist in relations with plants, animals, geologies, atmospheres, people and data, as well as in various combinations of one another.

live performing

“What else could nativeness and pre-objectiveness still tell us?” / 2015

On the NOISE IS US, Series of Sound / Intermedia Events at CIRKULACIJA2 – Association for interdisciplinary, independent art production and circulation of contemporary art, October, 22th 2015, Ljubljana, Slovenia

“Do nativeness, pre-objectiveness and uncanny have something in common?”

On the Earzoom & Musich_Tech Festival, September, 19th 2015, Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia

detai of the interface
Detail of Interface designed for performances on EARZOOM & MUSICH_TECH Festival and on CIRKULACIJA2 Series of Sound/Intermedia Events. The software code designed by Matjaž Lenhart inspired by: http://earth.nullschool.net/

The main operation of the designed interface has been capturing spatial data dimensions and them properties of the selected geographic location on the map. Geographical spatial data showed the location coordinates, while the information associated with spatial properties means the speed of the winds and the sea. The location on the map I was selected based on daily reports is where the greatest concentration of refugees crossing the sea. So these data were influenced by the sonic character of a performance. During the complete details and the preparation time for the performance, I read the article about the drowning of a little boy, Alan Kurdi, from Syria. His tragic fate in hell echoes further in his father with his rebuke just before death: “did you bring us here to die?” Somehow, my intention in the performance was to “color” the raw geographical data because these data are also tragic events and have an emotional dimension. I am fully aware of the problematic nature of these statements. But I also think it is necessary to talk about it in an artistic way too.

“De-Morse-ing Sound Landscape” / 2017

On the SHARE NYC, Brooklyn, at the Issue Project Room, The (OA) Can Factory, 232 3rd Street, New York, US

collecting material, sound recordings ….

locations of site interventions

a short detail of an interactive vizualization during the performance / reconstruction 

The first realization was named “De-Morse-ing” and was conducted On the SHARE NYC, Brooklyn, at the Issue Project Room. I carried out several field recordings, primarily at locations associated with human migrations in the late 19th and early 20th century and also at various museum locations housing artefacts that had been confiscated from the native environments and their peoples. In addition to the recording device, I also used an application that had an algorithm based on Morse structure and translated spatial sound patterns of locations into a “random” letter format. My first audio-visual performance may have been reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist work of art Ursonate. This Dadaist idea of coincidence representing the idea that the process of creation is free of conscious will, had attracted me as it seemed similar to the quantum understanding of the process of “objective measurement.” The problem of “objectivity”, however, is that the interacting relationship between the measuring device and the subject cannot be “isolated” from each other. Therefore, at this stage, my performance was a collection of vague ideas and many questions related to both the specific history of NYC sites and my personal family history, both linked by a distant time perspective. Also, the experience of spatio-temporal networking of memories and facts  sharpened my sensibility to the extent which made me perceive museum artefacts of native peoples as witnesses of spatio-temporal networks rather than dead exhibited objects. And as I tried to recognize the pattern of them directly addressing us as their contemporaries, I ran into a problem that was then the “inspiration” for my next project. The problem is  associated with the physical- astronomical problem that space expands faster than the speed of light, and therefore the light never reaches its destination.

If I replace light with native peoples’ artefacts and try to reach their story, will their narration still be able to reach me?

Recitative Notation” of Air Scanning Morse Patterns at Njegoš’s and Prešern’s Monument in Ljubljana / 2018

In Galerija 42, Likovni fakultet Cetinje, Montenegro

The next audiovisual performance, conducted as a workshop with students at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, Montenegro, upgraded the New York experience by researching the origin of language and the way it works.

In its timeline, we highlighted the following :

  • the lost first human word
  • the poetry of 19th-century Slovenian and Montenegrin poets, who became an ideological attribute of the newly formed Balkan countries at the end of the 20th century,
  • the communication of two computers and their artificial intelligences, the element of the future which has become the reality of the present much earlier than expected.

Again, I used field recordings in the audio part and algorithmically obtained random letters, which were read by the generic voice of the computer. With the help of a technological loop live web transmission, I aged the participants’ inner voices. The visual part depicted the metaphorical context of a passing body and rocky landscape, focusing on “stones” used in expressions related to our organs (kidney stones, gallstones, heart of stone). They are the reference to several relations between voice and stone, for example,  Hegel’s discussion of the Colossi of Memnon and Beckett’s novel Molloy with its protagonist grinding stones.

“Sound loop: 13′ 13″ The Meaningless Bubbles” / 2020

Originally the performance was two days audio-streaming as an accompanying event at the Conference IKTVVIS, organized by the University of Ljubljana and the University of Maribor, on this site is set as a sound image.
The sound image 13’13” – The Meaningless Bubbles is made for »unacclimated ears« (the term is taken from the Slovenian Radioshow Godbeni Imperializem by Luka T. Zagoričnik on Radio Študent).

Alvin Lucier created a dramatical sound performance where he demonstrated how the meaning of speech gradually decomposes and eventually disappears into a carrier frequency of sound – »noise«.

The whole sonority and the idea of The Meaningless Bubbles is derived from the semantically related statements of two prominent figures: a politician and a scientist. They are not in juxtaposition to form new meaning and they both declare »that they know nothing about it«. Verbal deconstruction of their statements merges into the sound alluding to »the victim«,i.e. the bat –  the transmitter. The apparent “non-meaning” of their statements may imply new paradigms of the 21st century: Clouds, Bubbles…

The original idea of performance was conceived as web audio streaming with interactive visualization. Due to the epidemiological situation, the live event was canceled so that only audio two-day online streaming occurred. There are some inserts from the visualization in the photos.