Balthazar by Maximilian Haas

“BALTHAZAR is a performance for an animal and human performers. The piece was inspired by the film “Au Hazard Balthazar” (1966) by Robert Bresson, which tells the biography of a donkey. This artistic choice is now being placed within the context of a performance. The donkey – Balthazar – forms the cloudy center of the action. The animal is the protagonist of the piece, while the nameless human performers come and go.
By developing and modifying performative constellations between a donkey and human performers on stage, BALTHAZAR unfolds a series of theatrical experiments. By giving various cultural takes on animals and the otherness of nature, the strategies and capacities of theatre are pushed to their boundaries. The spectator witnesses a naturalistic experimental play, that offers a direct and complex experience with an animal.”

Quoted from http://vimeo.com/25446885

Film als Leben / Leben im Film

“Der Verstand darf sich auf das Leben nur beziehen, wenn er die Originalität des Lebens anerkennt. Das Denken des Lebendigen muss die Idee des Lebendigen dem Lebendigen selbst entnehmen. Wir haben den Verdacht, dass es für die Mathematik genügen würde, Engel zu sein; um aber Biologie zu betreiben – selbst mit Hilfe des Verstandes – müssen wir uns zuweilen wie Tiere fühlen.”
(Georges Canguilhem)

Today was the first session of the seminar “Film als Leben / Leben im Film” by Prof. Marie-Luise Angerer. Starting with a citation by french philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem she was giving a short preview about this semester´s curriculum.

Hier der Text zur Veranstaltung aus dem Vorlesungsverzeichnis:

“Film und Leben sind über ihre Achse der Zeit auf eine Weise verquickt, die Leben als immer schon technisch und die Technik als immer schon lebendig inszeniert. Film ist von Beginn seiner Entwicklung an das Medium, welches das Leben sich in der Zeit/als Zeit entfalten lässt. Frühe Beispiele der Zellentwicklung als filmisches Ereignis lassen sich hierfür zitieren (Kelty/Landecker). Doch die Filmgeschichte hat auch viele Beispiele dafür, wie Film Leben als Technik (auch im Sinne von Kulturtechniken) inszeniert (Truffauts „L’Enfant Sauvage“, „Das Dschungelbuch“, „Avatar“). Und die Filmtheorie wartet mit einer langen Tradition auf, in der sich Film- und Lebenszeit vermischen (objektive und subjektive Zeit). Exemplarisch können hierfür Vivian Sobchak, Victor Burgin und Bernard Stiegler benannt werden. Die Verschränkung von Technik und Leben, die heute einen angeblich neuen Intensivierungsgrad erlebt, erweist sich in dieser Perspektive als möglicherweise falscher Ausgangspunkt – was, so die Frage vielmehr, wenn Natur – Leben – Materie sich als Zeit und in der Zeit nicht so sehr als different, sondern „nur“ als différant (verschoben, aufgeschoben) zu begreifen sind?”

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

Yesterday we again discussed the concept of performance /performativity and how this term is used in the context of different frameworks such as visual arts, theatre, sociology and anthropology, linguistics, gender studies, science studies and new media. [Some of these realms put the body as central point (i.e. theatre, gender studies) while other mostly concentrate on technology (i.e. science studies, new media).]

In the visual arts for example, “theatricality is creeping in” and replaces the self-sufficient art object as postulated by critics as Clement Greenberg and Micheal Fried by a flow of experiences, breaking down the limits between the art object and the observer, between art and life etc. This happend i.a. with the advent of Minimal Art wich focused on perception and conceded an important role to the observer in what concerns the construction of the work.
In her book “Performance Art”, Roselee Goldberg traces the roots of what is called “performance” (such as body art, earth art etc.) through the different (i.e. european, american, japanese) avantgardes.

(Sociology/anthropology and the Social Sciences …)

“Performance theory” emerges – performance is used as a methodology to look at certain phenomena. What is similar about the term “performance” through all these different disciplines is the idea that performance is not about representing but about doing, and that it describes something which is not fixed but constituted in time.

We were then focusing on the essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” written by American philosopher Judith Butler in 1988. Butler refers to phenomenological theory (i.e. Merleau-Ponty), the linguistic tradition (i.e. Searle, Austin and the theory of “speech acts”)…

To read:
Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present
Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood
Clement Greenberg
Richard Schechner: Performance Theory

“Animal Needs”: The Frog as Medium

Last week´s seminar was about “epistemic animals” which “inscribe themselves” through technical instruments and apparatuses. Today we wanted to talk about animals being used as media, focusing on a certain animal: The frog, which has been introduced to the history of science by Luigi Galvani.

Experimental setup as desribed in “De viribus electricitatis in moto musculari” (1791)

To read:
Benjamin Bühler, Stefan Rieger (Germany, 2006): Vom Übertier. Ein Bestiarium des Wissens
Luigi Galvani (Italy, 1791): Abhandlung über die Kräfte der Elektrizität bei der Muskelbewegung (Aloysii Galvani: De viribus electricitatis in moto musculari)

What is an experiment, what are the nonhumans?

For today´s seminar “How Stuff Performs” conducted by Chris Salter we were supposed to read the following texts:

The first text is by Hans Jörg Rheinberger and is called “Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things”, the second one is a text called “After Dualism” by Andrew Pickering.