Juniper wood, found burnt wooden disc and wooden furniture sections, porcelain, aluminum cast, 3D-printed gears, transducer speaker, capacitance sensor, electric motors
The installation is part of Greenlightdistrict 2021 at Kunsthall Grenland (NO) opening September 18th in Porsgrunn. It’s a creature that senses, moves and expresses itself. A sense organ made of porcelain with a villus-shaped inside covered with conductive copper hairs that “smells” the air. It reacts to its sensory inputs with a meandering arm of wood, plastic, and motors. A transducer and wooden disc vibrate sounds of expression.
Someone said meaning comes from existing in the world – being embodied and interacting in the world. Creating bodily and emotional interconnections to the outside world is maybe more important than ever in these verge-of-catastrophic times.
Perhaps we are always a pot Or that which is contained by the pot Depending on the viewpoint
Conversation Between Bodies is an ongoing collaboration between Sara Rönnbäck and Daniel Slåttnes, departing from an idea of material consciousness. The project was initiated in 2015 and has so far resulted in twelve exhibitions and an artist book (Locus Publication, 2017). In the project, the artists explore inter-material relationships. Conversations Between Bodies is born out of the ambition to find paths of understanding each other and our surroundings outside of verbal language. Where lies the boundaries between my body and yours? What is a body? What is the distinction between object and subject? These are questions that run through the exhibition.
The conversation is continuous and takes place on different levels, in actions and gestures, through silent and auditive impulses. The artists take a choreographic approach to the world – where the environment exercises influence – for better or worse, just as the water shapes the rocks by a riverbed, rounding down their edges, invading their cracks and tearing them up in pieces.
The artists live on a small country farm, and this is reflected throughout the exhibition, with works made of clay, wood and stone. Some ceramic sculptures are burned in Raku technique in a wood fired furnace built on the farm by the artists themselves. Conversations Between Bodies is an eco-feministic project with an animist and empathic approach to materials. The artists aspire to be sensitive to signals from their materials while shaping the clay or cutting the wood. In their own words: “Shapes develop as we become acquainted with the materials and together we reach an understanding that results in a form. We avoid imposing a preconceived idea of the result and try to be humble in our roles as active agents.”
Digital Wild – Meta.Morf X Biennale for Art and Technology , Gråmølna Trondheim Kunstmuseum, NO I Am a Multitude – Festival Exhibition at the Arctic Arts Festival 2021, Galleri Nord-Norge, Harstad, NO
In 2015, I started a collaboration with a houseplant from my studio. The plant, an ordinary baby rubber plant happened to sit on my desk when I asked What is life? I started simply by spending time with the houseplant. This grew a bodily connection. Through multiple experiments, we have made series of sculptures together where I have processed the sculptures on our behalf.
I discovered that we have another commonality in the biosignals going through our bodies. By amplifying the electrical signals via electrodes on my scalp and on the plant’s leaves, we could listen to each other’s vibrations. During the experiments on the plant’s electrophysiology, I wondered if the plant could be taught to move a robotic body. With the help of engineers, I built a prosthesis for the plant so that it could move with its own biosignals. The signals to the plant are interpreted by a machine learning network which then moves the motors in the feet of the plant. It was a great help for the collaboration that the plant was able to move in my time-space.
Over the past year, I’ve been researching how six houseplants interact with each other and the things around them. They have robotic prostheses as a tool for me to see their reactions immediately instead of weeks later.
This resulted in a journal with observations and reflections around the life of the houseplants:
The breath that leaves me, stay inside, Corporum, Aarhus, DK
Variable Dimensions Carved and painted pieces of aspen wood
I carved portraits of tree logs and tried to let the wood pieces steer my knife while working on them. I wanted to let the tree influence me before I overruled with a form of expression.
1 meter diameter Carved dead pine tree, acrylic paint
The work is a site-specific sculpture consisting of a dead pine tree I carved on for a week. I look at it as a portrait of the old tree. An intuitive processing of the body it has left to life in the forest. And an attempt to express the experience I had of the tree while I worked on it.
Conversation Between Bodies is an ongoing collaborative project between artists Daniel Slåttnes and Sara Rönnbäck which begun in 2015.
Employing various technologies and craftings assemblage, the work amplifies connectivity between these things, linked in a network of transferred data and meaning. They carry their own history, but also create new connections in the meeting with us and each other. In the project, the artists start from the idea that materials also have a will of their own, and the collaborative process of making the work gives the material the opportunity to express itself.
In this process, we have realized that it is not only difficult to communicate with non-human but that it is also a challenge between the two of us as partners. Using verbal language, many nuances are lost to misinterpretations and translations. Can we learn something about understanding the “other” by trying to communicate with our cat, a tree, or a stone?
In this project, we, therefore, focus on physical communication, and on the various ways in which we attempt to connect, intellectually and concretely. The network we built in the exhibition space functions like the mycelium that links life forms on the forest floor. The boundaries between me, you, and it is erased. In this room we are all bodies or objects, depending on how much free will we are willing to attribute.
Video documentation of performance
In the project, we investigate ways of communication and the limits of understanding the materials as radical non-humans, and each other as fundamentally estranged by nature.
In a performance we wear masks, which also function as EEG devices. The devices record electrical signals created by our brains and translate them into sound.
The sculptures carry similar devices that act as amplifiers for the materials’ electromagnetic fields, which also are translated to sound. In the overall sound, we imagine a super-organism together with the materials and the space.
