Manual project

Manual operates as a platform for developing process-oriented and relational practices, focusing on forms of collaboration and public dialogue.

How to foster collaborative investigations involving the energies and dynamics of urban spaces?

Manual functions as a blend of workshop and staging, on-site research and open-ended exchange.
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Manual for the construction of a sound as a device to elaborate social connection - Oslo

with

Siri Austeen - hum of the tram
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec - virtual mirror / reality soundtrack
Brandon LaBelle - diary of a stranger
Jana Winderen - noise and imagination
Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl aka å+k - bike circuit

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Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl aka å+k - bike circuit

 

In this bicycle storytelling performance five to seven bike riders are in close contact with the streets of Oslo and with each other, with human and non-human actors. As we are on the bicycles we are in between places not knowing exactly where we are going. Things will matter and the meaning-making will be under constant negotiation.

We envision the bicycle ride as a negotiation on where to direct one's attention, what to listen to, where to go, what to put on the agenda, what to talk about. While we head out for a collaborative non-centered storytelling journey we will pass messages on to each other, as in the game of Chinese Whispers. During the bicycle ride every biker will have an audio recorder. Consequently, there will be recordings from every participant's perspective and position. At the same time every voice will leak into the others' recordings.

The aim for the bike riders is to not put the foot down during the ride, but to help each other keep a flow as we create a polyphonic narrative through passing on information to each other about fellow actors in the streets, be that other bikers, red lights, cars or animals.

Theorist Donna Haraway refers to science and knowledge production when she says that we are always situated and partial in our perspectives. Nobody can play the God trick, nobody can have a total overview, as well as nobody can be nowhere, but together, by weaving into each others stories and by adding layers, we can tell a richer story.

The bikers were: Susanne Wehner, Sven Erga, Morten Myhre, Martin Knutsen and Fredrik Hossmann.

  

 

An installation presents the bike performance recordings, using mini-fm transmitters and radio receivers, each representing a single person who participated in the bike performance. The radios stand in for the bicyclists, and can be moved around in the installation, to accentuate more closely the different positions and perspectives.

The radios start to whisper, to sound, to draw attention, as an orchestration without center; one is here, then another, there. A steady sound with small breaks, ruptures, a voice that suddenly appears, just above a general sound field, or a bell – a musical sound, an everyday sound, a small chiming – that pricks the surface of the collective. A space made from multiple perspectives, each one giving view to a particular, individual experience, and yet each interlocked, organized, an agreement to participate, to stay together. With that sound here, and that one, there, a subtle rendering of group dynamics emerges, within the noise and interference of so many signals.