Artistic research project
Author:
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Works:
Heredrum (2014)
Rhythms of presence (2015)
Reading stanley brouwn (2015–2016)
Unheard (2016)
With a Passerby (2016)
Artistic research project
Rhythms Of Presence focuses its attention on the (in)visible manifestations of bodily presence as an acoustical and temporal phenomenon.Through the process of capturing the rhythms of everyday steps
or listening to an ambiance of a place in order to re-articulate and
displace them in various ways, this project explores the poetic,
aesthetic and philosophical potentialities of the omnipresent
infra-ordinary rhythms of everyday life.
Bringing these rhythms to the fore in the settings of several
rhythmical, sonic and spatial situations, hybrid places of intersection
between presence and absence, concrete and abstract, here and somewhere
else are established.
Rhythms of presence
The installation Rhythms of Presence is comprised of two large
floor surfaces. One is discretely installed at an undisclosed location
and the other in the exhibition space. They are identical in size and
shape. The floor surface at the undisclosed location is sensing human
steps, transmitting their temporal and spatial information to the
exhibition space, where a grid of mechanical knockers from below the
floor surface is invisibly tapping the rhythms of the remotely detected
steps and following their paths. Focusing solely on rhythms and paths of
everyday walking, the installation Rhythms of Presence aims to
capture the invisible aspects of walking and investigate how they
contribute to constituting presence, temporality and spatiality.
Displacing and superimposing the walking rhythms and paths of one place
to those of another, the installation creates a hybrid and asymmetrical
space where two simultaneous present times and presences interfere. A
floor that becomes unknowingly performative and a floor that echoes
steps from an unknown origin together form an open unsitely space that
is both here, somewhere else and at the same instance nowhere and
in-between. Stepping in this space one inhabits a concrete, yet
un-mappable and disoriented territory.
Software and hardware development: Mr. Stock Interfaces
Carpenters: Seamus Cater, Bill Earwaker (Berlin), Ales Bracovic Strmec (Ljubljana)
Sponsors: Future-Shape GmbH. Tremba GmbH, Showbots Engineering Gmbh
Thanks to: Robocross
– Berlin | James Beckett
20.11.–15.12.2015,
galery Errant bodies Berlin, Germany
1.–21.9.2016, Rom8 Project Space Bergen, Norvey
18.11.–9.12.2016, Galerija ŠKUC, Ljubljana
Reading stanley brouwn
The work entitled
Reading stanley brouwn addresses the theme of everyday walking, measuring, archiving, reading and rhythmic temporality.
By way of reading the artistic book
my steps 12.12.2005–1.1.2006,
the project establishes a relationship with the opus of the conceptual
artist stanley brouwn (Suriname/Netherlands), whose many works address
the (im)measurability and materiality of the distances and their
archivisation through the process of counting his own steps.
The project contains three elements
– the book
my steps 12.12.2005–1.1.2006 of the artist stanley brouwn, an action of Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, and
an installation which repositions the book and the action “in the now”
as an unclear and elusive rhythmical instruction, suggestion, norm or
support for movement, reflection or listening.
The book consists of twenty-one pages, each page having the date and
the number of steps printed on it. Sambolec reads it in a way that in
the period of twenty-one days (from 1.2.2016 – 21.2.2106), on each day
he walks precisely the prescribed number of steps, simultaneously
recording their rhythms. The installation consists of the book and a
modified metronome which ticks in the recorded rhythms of Sambolec’s
steps.
Through the activity of inscribing the text into his own body,
Sambolec inhabits brouwn’s archive with his own presence. The
measured-out walk makes concrete the printed number of steps by bringing
them back into the everyday, from which they have originated. If
brouwn’s archive points to a walked distance and thus invites the reader
to imagine this distance, of which the measuring unit is an unknown
variable, Brouwn’s step, then Sambolec’s reading transposes this
(un)defined distance into the dimension of time — into rhythm and
duration.
The recorded time of the steps constitutes a new invisible
digital archive of rhythms, whose variations echo Sambolec’s walked
path, his intentions, as also his spatial and social bearings. And like
brouwn’s, this archive too is imperfect, abstract, directionless,
ambiguous and open.
Software and hardware development: Mr. Stock InterfacesSoftware development: Slavko Glamočanin
Thanks to: Robocross
– Berlin | James Beckett
4.11.
–6.12.2015, MSUM
Ljubljana
1.–13.9.2016, Lydgalleriet Bergen, Norvey
10.–13.3.2016, Anarchic Infrastructures Amsterdam, Netherland
18.11.–9.12.2016, Galerija ŠKUC, Ljubljana
1.5.–2.7.2017, Research
Pavilion: "Utopia of Access", Benetke, Italy
2.7.–31.10.2017, Reassembly,
Tinos Quarry Platform, Tinos, Greece
16.11.2018–16.1.2019, "Bijeg"
–"Escape", MMSUM Reka, Croatia
Unheard
Installation Unheard consists of a microphone, a clock and a
custom made software that resets the clock to zero every time it detects
a sudden peak in loudness of the sonic ambiance of the place where it
is installed.
Listening to the ambient sound and displaying the passing of
clocked time between occurring auditory events, the installation
articulates the relation between the measured time and the time as it is
being experienced.
This setting invites the visitors to focus on listening along
and to explore their own margins of hearing and attention, while it is
suggesting a shadow temporality unfolding in the intertwining zone
between the representation and the experience of the passing of time. A zone so lucidly outlined by Giorgio Agamben in his essay The Time That Is Left (2000):
“(…) if we represent time as a straight line and its end as a
last point on it, then we have something perfectly representable, but
absolutely unthinkable. On the other hand, if we try to grasp our living experience
of time, then we have something thinkable, but strictly
non-representable.”
Software development: Vasja Progar
1.–21.9.2016, Bergen Public Library – Café Amalies Hage, Bergen, Norvey
18.11.–9.12.2016, Galerija ŠKUC, Ljubljana
With a Passerby
In the installation
With a Passerby two crosswalk loudspeakers
are sounding rhythms Sambolec has recorded during a walk in a city. One
speaker is playing back the rhythms of Sambolec’s footsteps and the
other one is playing back the rhythms of steps of people passing by,
that Sambolec was observing, marking them with his voice and recording.
Installation brings to the fore the hidden rhythmical relation
of the steps of two strangers walking by each other on a street in an
urban environment, articulating and highlighting this moment of
encounter without contact as a rhythmical non-event.
Combining the elements of aimless walking, observing strangers
and random encounters, this project alludes to the figure of flaneur as
it is epitomized in the poem by Charles Baudelaire “To a Passerby”.
Here the poet describes an emotion of falling in love with a passerby
that he will never see again. A dramatized and affective random
encounter that Walter Benjamin describes as “love – not at first sight, but at last sight”.
Contrary to this fascination, the present project does not seek
for emotional investment and relation towards a random passerby, but is
rather focusing on the listening to the hidden rhythms that occur
during usually unnoticed and unexperienced encounters that are taking
place in everyday situations on the street. Sounding these uncoordinated
rhythms the installation is amplifying the moments of passing by as
occurrences of non-contact, non-attention, non-communication and
non-synchronization.
18.11.–9.12.2016, Galerija ŠKUC, Ljubljana
6.–13.5.2017, COMMAND-ALTERNATIVE-ESCAPE, Garden Thetis Venice, Italy
3.–18.6.2017, Struer // Tracks, Struer, Danmark
Producers: Zavod SPLOH,
Ljubljana, Zavod Projekt Atol, Ljubljana
Partner: Galerija
ŠKUC, Ljubljana
Heredrum
Sound intervention in public space
Heredrum trains its attention on the imperceptible and
hidden rhythms of everyday walking by observing, capturing, and performing
these rhythms where they occur. The intervention exposes the everyday step as a contact point between
foot and ground that embodies the relations between body, space, inner mental
state, and social life. An event that is both a personal strongly felt yet
largely unnoticed sensation, and a public manifestation of presence.
The work involves a
group of ten or more drummers with snare drums attached to their waists, which
walk into a populated public square during an afternoon, spreading out evenly
in a large formation. Each drummer focuses on the steps taken by a random
passer-by, hitting their snare each time the passer-by’s foot hits the ground
until they leave or are out of sight; the drummer then pauses for a short time
only to focus on another passer-by.
17.9.2014, Bergen, Norway
3.–18.6.2017, Struer // Tracks, Struer, Danmark
5.–6.6.2019, Exchanges and Misunderstandings Performance Program,The National Gallery of Arts, Tirana, Albania
Producers: Zavod SPLOH,
Ljubljana, Zavod Projekt Atol, Ljubljana
Artistic research project Rhythms of Presence was carried out under the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme at Bergen Academy of Art and Design – KHiB (2013–2016)
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