HAU

Aristophanes貍貓, Eartheater &c @ HAU, Jun 29

28 June 2016

Aristophanes貍貓 and Eartheater are performing Berlin’s Hebbel Am Ufer (HAU) on June 29.

Hosted by events organisers Creamcake, the event kicks off the lead up to the second 3hd Festival, happening in the German capital in October.

Taipei-based producer and rapper, Aristophanes is best known for featuring on LA-based pop star Grimes‘ 2015 Art Angels album on the song ‘SCREAM’, while Eartheater is a New York-based artist-musician working with the voice, synths, guitar and electronic production.

Finnish artist AGF and Berlin-based producer Dis Fig will follow the event with DJ sets in the WAU restaurant next door.

See the HAU website for details.**

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3hd Festival, Dec 2 – 5 new announcement

9 November 2015

The 3hd Festival has announced more participants in their inaugural events programme under the theme of ‘The Labor of Sound in a World of Debt’, running at various Berlin locations from December 2 to 5.

Launched by the event series Creamcake and curated by Daniela Seitz and Anja Weigl, the festival is devoted to artists, performers, musicians, academics, and journalists who examine “the labor of sound” and question both its cultural causes and its social consequences.

Among the many new events recently announced are Parisian composer Oklou and Berlin composer Soda Plains at OHM Gallery on December 3, Berlin artist duo Aurora Sander and London-based cellist Oliver Coates at HAU on December 4, and London producer Nkisi and Berlin producer DJ Paypal at Südblock on December 5.

See the 3hd festival for details. **

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Isabel Lewis @ Tanz im August reviewed

15 September 2015

For a third night, Isabel Lewis presents what she terms as her ‘occasion’ format at Berlin’s HAU theatre. Inside people sit or rest on soft carpet. It’s a visual merging of floor and seating, where visitors come and go as they please in what is one of an ongoing and open-ended series of hosted gatherings, recently presented as part of Tanz im August, on September 4. Breathing in and out, it seems the space could be breathing too, as amplified sound and light dimmers change the visible and invisible atmosphere. In the air hangs a mix of ‘the garden’, ‘the club’ and ‘the site of intellectual culture’, sprayed molecules DJ-ed like an endless looping of sound, a release of custom-made smells resulting from a collaboration between the artist and Berlin chemist Sissel Tolaas.

Along with the sight of Lewis moving around the room comes the realisation that this occasion is a kind of hybrid-complex of theatre, exhibition, nightclub and symposium. And the related host, who is sometimes central but also marginal to the live content, an embodiment of dancer, artist, DJ and interlocutor. Highly constructed, Lewis has affected the biochemistry in the room, either by the presence of lush garden-design or by the management of group conversation, ranging from questions about the ‘good life’ or sensing energy flows from humans and plants.

Lewis has said that these occasions recall STRANGE ACTION, her touchstone work from 2009, which is seen as a prototype for transitioning the role of performer to host. Earlier this year, STRANGE ACTION was presented to a small crowd at Yvonne Lambert in Berlin. At some point in the evening, the artist entered the room and tried to enable a conversation about Mr. T and Nicole Kidman. She was interested in the former’s cult TV personality, his near perfect embodiment of a character, a figure intended for the fictional moments of action-adventure watched at home. In contrast, the latter actress was spoken about as a kind of antithesis, an actor who is rarely able to reach the characters she sets out to embody, an unintended outcome of her own super-star status. In the final moments of STRANGE ACTION, music was played and the artist head-banged until reaching an emotional and physical climax, a limit visually signified by Lewis in tears and disconnecting from her hosted crowd.

In this occasion, there are moments when Lewis also breaks away from compèring conversations, seeking instead an excitement that is not directly intended for the audience. This is seen when the artist’s attention shifts from her interactions with the crowd to interacting with the computer. DJ softwares Traktor, GarageBand and djay Pro have been running the whole night and Lewis lines up a mix of ‘Ima Read’ by New York rapper Zebra Katz.

Decoration for an occasion at Kunsthalle Basel, October 2015. Courtesy the artist.
Decoration for an occasion at Kunsthalle Basel, October 2015. Courtesy the artist.

In this moment, it seems artist and computer are working together, as if a flow of energy is moving between human and machine, a continuous feedback with sound as its focus, a rhythmic loop. It’s here that the idea that the processor is hosting the crowd emerges, if only between beats, so that the artist might find an emotional intensity that is solely individual. Under these conditions of part-artist, part-computer automation –a gap is created. Just like in STRANGE ACTION, Lewis begins to move around the crowd, head down, grinding. At first, it seems that she’s fulfilling her contract as host, but then it becomes clear that Lewis’ physical movements are not really for the viewer. The choreography is based on something mnemonic, a source of emotional intensity, where access is denied, and as a consequence makes her energetic movements her own.

This interpretation raises an interesting question about service-orientated art and the acknowledgment that where there is a service there is also human fatigue. Or to put it another way, fatigue from hosting. Indeed, since the current technological advent –a world of immaterial (service)-labour and material-labour, and where host-body and host-service are seen as one –can we find a gap in our internet and computer-adapt lives to be individual? Some might blame our digital inventions for the rise of serviced individuals. But on this ‘occasion’, it is precisely through syncing with computers that the electric flows of individualisation continues. There, the individual is once more in attendance. **

Isabel Lewis’ Occasions was on at Berlin’s Tanz im August, August 26, 2015.

Header image: Isabel Lewis. Courtesy the artist.

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