(2019)
Aldea Center for Contemporary Art, Bergen, NO
Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Bergen
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.
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.
