Tail of the Hen
Special event live and online. Talk + Performance.
The idea of Tail of the Hen originates from the practice by researchers at the Boulby Underground Laboratory (UK). With 1100 m of rock between the ground, it is an ideal place to study dark matter using ultra-sensitive detectors and ultra-low radiation techniques in an attempt to catch the faint breath of a particle wind blowing across space from a distant constellation: the Tail of the Hen.
Like dark matter in physics, the sense of presence and intimacy cannot be proven, grasped or directly studied. Like scientists who go far underground to study the stars, the artwork investigates telephone technology in a radically different way through the paradox of the intimacy and presence that potentially takes place between two people who are at a distance, each looking out through different windows, from different perspectives, onto the world.
The promise of virtual presence is not only a technological solution of connectivity. This new artwork by Lundahl & Seitl reveals virtual reality as an ability that is enabled but not defined by its technology.
The idea of Tail of the Hen originates from the practice by researchers at the Boulby Underground Laboratory (UK). With 1100 m of rock between the ground, it is an ideal place to study dark matter using ultra-sensitive detectors and ultra-low radiation techniques in an attempt to catch the faint breath of a particle wind blowing across space from a distant constellation: the Tail of the Hen.
Like dark matter in physics, the sense of presence and intimacy cannot be proven, grasped or directly studied. Like scientists who go far underground to study the stars, the artwork investigates telephone technology in a radically different way through the paradox of the intimacy and presence that potentially takes place between two people who are at a distance, each looking out through different windows, from different perspectives, onto the world.
The promise of virtual presence is not only a technological solution of connectivity. This new artwork by Lundahl & Seitl reveals virtual reality as an ability that is enabled but not defined by its technology.
How to experience the artwork:
Tail of the Hen is experienced in pairs through an app. You’ll make rendezvous with someone else anywhere in the world.
Download the app, go to a window on connect at the times indicated above.
Instructions:
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Equip yourself with a smartphone and earphones
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Download the app for free via QR code, or Google Play or Apple Store.
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Access the app at the times indicated
CREDITS
The talk and performance by Lundahl & Seitl are in collaboration Future Storytelling Lab Zwolle - ArtEZ, School of the Creative and Performing Arts - University of Calgary (CA), STREAMING MUSEUM (US) e Walkin Studios (IN)
***The art work is presented as part of Codici Magici***
The symposium “Codici Magici” is curated by Marialaura Ghidini and Sara Bortoletto. The project is produced by MO.CA - center for new cultures, and co-promoted by Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Municipality of Brescia, in collaboration with AVISCO.The symposium“Codici Magici” is co-sponsored by MO.CA - center for new cultures, Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Municipality of Brescia, in collaboration with AVISCO.
“Codici Magici" (transleted to Magic Codes) is an exploration into the realm of technomagic, and the human expressions in which technology and magic interconnect across the organic, inorganic and spiritual spheres. A journey through the codes that generate new post-capitalist scenarios that are ritual and totemic, and pave the way for novel forms of human affirmation beyond anthropocentrism.
"Magic Codes" is a hybrid symposium that explores all this through talks by artists, curators, anthropologists and semioticians, alongside a video screening and interactive art experiences such as workshops, and participatory and sound performances.
Link to “Codici Magici” webpage (ITA) > https://www.morettocavour.com/codici-magici-programma/
ABOUT THE PARTNERS
MO.CA - center for new cultures is an incubator of innovative projects in the field of contemporary art and culture that has been based in the historic Palazzo Martinengo Colleoni in Malpaga, Brescia, since 2016. MO.CA hosts 8 cultural associations and a university institution, whose activities range from photography to theater, multimedia technology and design. It also hosts the Makers Hub Brescia in support of young entrepreneurs in the field of innovation and crafts. MO.CA is a project of cultural valorisation promoted by the Municipality of Brescia, in collaboration with: Fondazione ASM, trade associations (Confartigianato, Associazione Artigiani Brescia, CNA and Assopadana) and Brescia Infrastrutture. https://www.morettocavour.com/
STREAMING MUSEUM brings a worldview into focus through programs and publications on the arts and culture, forward thinking ideas and international affairs. The museum was launched by Nina Colosi on January 29, 2008 as a public art experiment using the burgeoning communication and creative digital technologies to produce exhibitions and present them on screens in public spaces on 7 continents, cultural and commercial centers and its website. Streaming Museum is a partner in the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, Culture & Creativity - a body of the European Union. https://www.streamingmuseum.org/
(Their page for the event, https://www.streamingmuseum.org/lundahl-seitl-tail-of-the-hen )
The Future Storytelling Lab (FSL) is an interdisciplinary research space where ArtEZ Bachelor's students, Master's students, and employees are welcome to learn more about working with new technologies. Not only that, but it also looks at how these technologies make us look at the world in a fundamentally different way or how working with them could contribute to tackling some of the global problems around climate, automation, inclusion, and equality.
ArtEZ https://www.artez.nl/future-storytelling-lab
The School of the Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) at the University of Calgary offers advanced undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Dance, Drama, Music and Interdisciplinary Research and Creation. Reflecting both deep communal roots and far-reaching global impact, our creative and scholarly research embraces the intrinsic value of the arts to inspire individuals, animate communities, and bring about change in the world. Our flexible and individualized undergraduate and graduate programs prepare students to engage with the critical issues shaping current and future societies, providing a wide range of options for a diverse spectrum of learners and ways of knowing. https://arts.ucalgary.ca/creative-performing-arts/creative-performing-arts
Walkin Studios You are currently on their website.
TALK
14th December 2023
7:30am (MST) / 9:30 (EST) / 3:30 pm (CET) / 8:00 pm (IST)>
In this talk, Lundahl & Seitl reflect on the role of technology in their work and how it relates to freedom and control in the visitors’ process of enacting the artwork as a score.
Notions of freedom, autonomy, and what is real, imagined, and perceived are negotiated in an investigation of virtual reality, not as a form of technology but as an ability or sensibility to the relationship we create with our surroundings with an increased insight how technology makes us and lay the ground for our human umwelt – how it connects and disconnects us from each other and other lifeforms and processes.
For over fifteen years, Lundahl & Seitl have developed a practice where complex artworks exist in and through the perception and projections of the visitor. Through their heuristic relationship to process, and collaborations across disciplines, the duo has developed a method and an artform comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organise perception into a world.
*Streamed live on Mo.Ca - centro per le nuove culture YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9vW_N4u-F0
ARTWORK “TAIL OF THE HEN*
First session:
8:30am (MST) / 10:30 am (EST) / 16:30 (CET) / 9pm (IST) >
Site-sensitive artwork “Tail of the Hen” by Lundahl & Seitl
Second session
9:30am (MST) / 11:30 am (EST) / 17:30 (CET) / 10pm (IST)* >
Site-sensitive artwork “Tail of the Hen” by Lundahl & Seitl
Tail of the Hen is a site-sensitive work that radically repurposes the mobile phone in a poetic approach to our present-day digital encounters and their confusing, disturbing, illusory, yet weirdly comforting psychological sides.
In a mesmerizing journey, with friends or strangers around the world, Tail of the Hen combines immersive methods and technologies to enter the infrastructures that our everyday depend upon, but yet are invisible or ungraspable to most.
We sink through buildings of flats, passing sewage systems and fibre optic cables. At the end of our descent, inside the reverbs of a cave, we may finally meet the person on the other side.