Documentation

My Brother’s Mobile Phone Keeper: The Mysterious Relations of Unmysterious Things – Olga Efremov
In spring 2019 my brother lost his cancer battle. Without going deep into the emotions and consequences of the event that had become a life-altering landmark for me, I can certainly say that it put in a very skeptical light the speculations of even a remote possibility for the technology, present, past or…
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[Recap] TiM Seminar 2022-23 “The Medium is a Medium — Intersecting Technology and Spirituality in a More-than-human World” – Evelyn Wan (UU)
by Pauline Munnich In the session “The Medium is a Medium” Evelyn Wan explored the intersection between technology and spirituality, reflecting on how intertwined the more-than-human world and technology have been throughout history. Dali Wan started by showing a video about an AI experience created by the Salvador Dali Museum in…
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Book Launch: Doing Dramaturgy and What Dramaturgy Can Do
Join us for the festive launch of Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (Palgrave 2023) and the revamped Dramaturgy Database of Utrecht University. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Maaike Bleeker speak about making theatre as a process of thinking through practice and dramaturgy as attending to such practices of making-thinking. How can we conceptualize doing dramaturgy today…
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In Defence of Ephemerality – Chris van der Vegt
Laura Karreman concluded her lecture in the Transmission in Motion series with a couple of elements of the imaginary surrounding motion capture in performance that she had identified. One of these items was that motion capture can enable a kind of “saviour’s complex” toward dance and performance, trying to protect the art from…
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[Recap] TiM Seminar 2022-23 “Cultural Dreams of Datafied Bodies in Contemporary Performance” – Laura Karreman (UU)
by Pauline Munnich In the session “Cultural Dreams of Datafied Bodies in Contemporary Performance” Laura Karreman discusses recent artworks arising from the cultural imagination of bodies in movement and motion capture. She does this by focusing on dance, illustrating the link between movement and the motion capture imaginary, drawing on her book Embodied…
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[Recap] TiM Seminar 2022-23 “Notes on the Political Imaginary and Exhibitions” – Nick Aikens and Ohad Ben Shimon
Good-Bye VHS: The Political Scenography of Imagination by Olga Efremov The sixth session of 2022-23 Transmission in Motion seminar series took place at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, current home of the exhibition Rewinding Internationalism. Scenes for the 1990s Today. The session included the introduction and viewing of the exhibition followed by a talk…
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Macarena in Junkspace An Object-Oriented Ontology of Architexturized Dance – Olga Efremov
“What if?” That is the question. Once belonging to the realms of the speculative fiction writing craft, ‘what if’ question has been steadily earning recognition as a legitima te mode of academic inquiry. According to Media, Arts and Performance scholar Theron Schmidt (2021), a speculative approach premised on the use of ‘what if’…
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Meet the Makers: Neo Muyanga
In this session, Neo Muyanga presents the making of his recent production, ‘A Maze in Grace’, at the 34th São Paolo Art Biennale (2020). Amazing Grace was reportedly one of the hymns of solidarity that resounded spontaneously among those locals who gathered first at Ground Zero – the lower Manhattan district in New…
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I Don’t Want to Know: On Hauntologial Resistance and Black Posthumanist Utopias – Olga Efremov
My writing of this blog post is overshadowed by a tragic anniversary: one year from the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine. The past twelve months have been a trying emotional journey through the mediated theatre of the largest European military conflict of the 21st century that had inadvertently became a prism for…
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Life, Universe, and Karen Barad: The Stage of Death by A Thousand Agential Cuts – Olga Efremov
When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…
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