What, of Art, Belongs to the Present?

How Matter Objects

All too often, art is captured by objects (the realities of the present), but it does not want that (it has different desires). Objects as social entities (things that circulate/are being circulated) are created by those in power, which is all too often produced, in favour of the status quo, as a means to slow down history and social change. From the totem to money and to all of the desirables that keep the capitalist machines at work today, the aim of the object or the thing is to secure the organisation of society – to keep the hierarchies intact (money flowing in the right direction). Objects (realities of the present), in summary, are all too often obstacles for art. In the research lab that we have established for this occasion, we explore how art comes to matter – how it occupies, intervenes in, or deterritorialises objects, resisting the realities of the present.

DOKK and The Fracture Log

Signe Lidén will present DOKK, a new initiative that is working towards enabling long-term experience through studies of place, instrument building and production of artworks. DOKK has a fluid body shape and can take form a performance group, art platform or a research network from project to project. As a part of DOKK’s first project, Lidén is developing the instrument Fracture Log for a research of the Wadden Sea in Jylland and North Holland. The Fracture Log is an impulse-response based instrument for field recording that feeds the recording with disturbances triggered by changes in the water level, atmosphere, and other (silent) presences.

Through Ideas, Through Art, We Explore, Persist, and Resist

Students and scholars from the National Research School in Media Studies (RMeS) and Stanimir Panayotov explore the necessity of the present for art. Collectively, they will engage the ideas of thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges, and how these ideas resonate with the Sonic Acts Academy’s exhibitions and performances in order to map the strategies and tactics of art-in-time. Key to this mapping is the persistence and resistance in and through matter.