Parasite & Mimicry
- Published on Monday, 03 April 2017 13:20
Timos Alexandropoulos (GR), KVM (Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel, KR/FR), Christophe Wirth (DE), Irina Gheorghe (RO)
The overlapping between inside and outside manifests itself in the paradox of the trapped wolf in the second of Munchausen's fantastic stories. The wolf jumps to catch the horse which was pulling the sledge and starts eating his prey, but in so doing ends up finding himself inside the horse, trapped in his harness. The baron was the one promoting the situation by making himself invisible, by literally embracing the sledge and hiding from the danger of the raging wolf until he is able to conduct him instead of the horse. The baron is a figure of the mètis, making use of the situation in order to avoid any kind of binary opposition stuck between antagonistic power dynamics. Mètis is a type of intelligence and of thought “which is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous” (Detienne & Vernant).
The act of navigation within such a world is an invisible and unexpected blow: like parasites do in the micro level of natural conditions. A mimetic strategy of persisting within the given is a trap to manipulate the structures and contexts so that old dichotomies collapse in the environment where power is at work. It functions as an intuitive tactic to exist-resist on the intersection between inside and outside, acknowledging that there is no outside of power.
Parasite & Mimicry tries to outline a discursive, performative and aesthetic topography which provokes oblique and problematic entanglements. Timos Alexandropoulos’ sound installation is a sonic materialization of the first illegal prime number coexisting in contradictory zones, the one of legality and of illegality. Ju hyun Lee and Ludovic Burel’s minimalized karaoke deploys the typographic impact of lyrics in the mechanical device and the “aesthetic of administration” as a conceptual intersection between Western and Asian culture. Christophe Wirth’s experimental project uses applause in the theater context to subtract narration and play from the conventional mechanism of spectacle. Irina Gheorghe’s performance-video uses non-verbal gestures which have lost signification and power to act to investigate the weird superpositions between the exact sciences and the occult.
Nov Power / Vitamin B
by KVM (Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel)
For the exhibition Parasite and Mimicry, the KVM (Korean Vocal Museum) presents a video and sound installation of two songs extracted from the performative project Pop & Political Korean Karaoke — To Sing Foucault. Nov Power, from the original Psychic TV's song Ov Power (1982), uses minimal and repetitive lyrics on « biopower », Michel Foucault's concept on post-disciplinary control. KVM's karaoke device focuses on the typographic impact of the screen along with the post-punk melody customized by KVM. Vitamin B veers from the original German krautrock group CAN's Vitamin C (1972) and explores more on the bio-issue through the capitalist food industry, lighting on the mechanization of animals and their related pathologies. The absence of the singer's voice and physical action during the exhibition requires a kind of mental participation to the audience captured in the mechanical "dispositif " of an abstract pop and political karaoke apparatus.
Intersection two-channel synthetic sound
by Timos Alexandropoulos
Intersection is the sonic materialization of the first illegal prime number. The 1811-digit prime number’s binary representation, found by Phil Carmody, corresponds to an illegal source code (DeCSS hacking case) but at the same time is a prime large enough to be archived. Thus it exists in two contradictory zones, the one of legality and the one of illegality. The sonification of the first illegal prime number acts as a mediation for a sensory exploration of this paradox of our digital age, and of the employment of mètis – a wily intelligence – by the number’s finder in order to manipulate a binary situation. By utilizing sound as a tool of decoding different frameworks, conditions and relations, the installation examines the conceptual intersection of two sets that should not have any common element.
The Attack of the Lateral
by Irina Gheorghe
In trying to answer core questions on the nature of reality, philosophical investigation shares a common ground with the natural sciences, but starts to sound like a B-series sci-fi. What is (out) there? What is it like? are starting points of an outlandish trip in which philosophers, scientists and speculative writers try to engage with a world beyond sensory perception. They are trying to smuggle the invisible and find a form of mediation for a real which is utterly alien. Mystical self-erasure brings together the realist philosopher, the scientist as a 'modest witness' and the practitioner of the occult, all trying to channel 'the beyond' through their imperceptible presence. At the other end of this xeno-race lies the interventionist idea of knowledge, the active endeavor of tampering with the environment of the magician-technologist, with a whole toolbox of manipulating devices at hand. Between the two approaches, the film is an attempt to enact the possible gestures of a UFO metaphysics in the desolate landscape of the Curonian Spit in Nida, Lithuania.
Reframing applause
by Christoph Wirth
3 Videoloops of the performative research from the project !APPLAUDE(!)
!APPLAUDE(!) implements figurations of applauding into the silence of the theatre space. Given is: a show which consists of its proper frame, the material of applauding. Stage and auditorium exist in a state of suspense, in which the dynamics and potentials of both, their relations and disruptions become “experiencable”, their tensions concrete and performative. !APPLAUDE(!) seeks to examine the automatized mechanisms and dynamics at work in the the process of socio-cultural sense production and validation. The work aims to make these processes conscious again and therefore available for an alternate use. Is there a perspective under which the re – appropriation of over-encoded and consolidated social spaces, practices and performances is thinkable? The video loop – documentation transfers this problem to the gallery space, questioning the status of the art object, while at the same time raising the immaterial gesture of validation, affirmation and appreciation to the rank of an artifact.