A swarm of performers acting like normal users of smartphones are organised by Daniel Aschwanden and Conny Zenk. By extensive use of the communication devices they apparently voluntarily surrender themselves to self-surveillance and quantification. The production of “selfies” as a self-related practice as well as the integration into an anonymous mass likewise take place. Connected in all-embracing networks, whose individual exponents allow personal data to stream into gigantic virtual techno-landscapes controlled by state authorities and multinational corporations.
We no longer act, we stroke/swipe across the screens of our smartphones and pads, states the philosopher Bjung Chul Han in an essay, and in the everyday use of the gadgets we also swap the dimension of solidarity-based political action for short-lived hype. Thus my mobile phone picks me up just as much as I pick it up. Ergonomic scores dictate the immediate physical communication, which, as dictated by the device, arranges body and perspective into patterns and poses.
Former passive users or spectators have metamorphosed into active participants in cultural production, argues Mirko T. Schäfer in his book Bastardkultur: “Participation has become a key concept to understand the expanding new media practices.” He describes the consequences as an extension of the cultural industries. The most diverse user groups and practices are superimposed. Aschwanden and Zenk use the practice of “superimposing” as an artistic strategy in the visualisation of imaginary intersections between real bodies and their data in the material and immaterial worlds.
CONCEPT: Daniel Aschwanden, Conny Zenk
PERFORMERS: Charlotta Ruth, Nici Rutrecht, Dominik Grünbühel, Raphael Michon
CHOREOGRAPHY: Daniel Aschwanden
AV PERFORMANCE: Conny Zenk & Veronika Mayer
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SCORES N°9 takes an extended view of choreography – also beyond the body, extended to things, materials, to the autonomy of the non-human. How to get matter to speak and which organ to listen to it with? How to reorganise perception? How to assume responsibility for the surroundings that we ourselves shape? How to focus on the way in which things choreograph us?
Artists and theoreticians are invited to re-think things in their performances, lectures, lecture performances, dialogues, in workshops and training: by setting the world of matter in motion, and in particular the theatre machinery, exposing the apparatus, questioning embodiments.
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Conny Zenk 