Hypercube pressed between the pages of a .pdf

15-19.09.2016
Fabrica de Pensule, Cluj
PILOT Space
Artists: Adriana Gheorghe, Alina Popa, Ioana Gheorghiu, Florin Flueraș
Curated by: Larisa Crunțeanu

So I was scrolling through this .pdf. Mostly looking at words. It felt like reading but now I realise that was a lie. That was not a reading, but the aesthetic performance of a reading. The text was about ________________________ . It’s not to say I was completely absent. It was more like the mind stopped reading more than the eyes were. It was darker and darker in the room. But inside the computer is never dark. Now I know that the bright white screen was lying as well. It was telling eyes that reality existed and it could be untangled through descriptive and constitutive enunciations. Stable structures starting with a capital and ending with a full stop. And there I was, mesmerized by this lie, when I stumbled across this

pressed between two pages of the .pdf.

 

***

A point alienates from itself and becomes a line. A line alienates from itself and becomes a square. A square alienates from itself and becomes a cube. A cube alienates from itself and becomes a hypercube. (#BlackHyperBox #BhyperB)

 

BlackHyperBox is a project initiated by Alina Popa and Florin Flueraș and developed together with Bogdan Bălan, Larisa Crunțeanu, Andreea David, Ion Dumitrescu, Adriana Gheorghe, Ioana Gheorghiu, Cătălina Gubandru, Anastasia Jurescu, Alexandra Ivanciu, Cristian Nanculescu, Cosima Opârtan and Xandra Popescu, with the help of the the National Center of Dance Bucharest.

Schedule:
September 15th, 2016:
18.00 Reading circle and dinner with Florin Flueraș*
20.00 Performance “Point of Indifference” by Alina Popa

September 16th, 2016:
18.00 Reading circle and dinner with Alina Popa*
20.00 Performance “Spoils” by Adriana Gheorghe

September 17th, 2016:
18.00 Reading circle and dinner with Adriana Gheorghe*
20.00 Performance “Synthetic Sophisms” Ioana Gheorghiu

September 18th, 2016:
18.00 Reading circle and dinner with Ioana Gheorghiu*
20.00 Performance “Artificial Emotional Intelligence” by Florin Flueraș

*participation by registering at https://goo.gl/forms/22yMwpIQUzhy67Ql1 Bring your own food&drinks

Point of Indifference – Alina Popa
The plans of the first theatres, seen from above, draw a circle. The perfect theatre could be inscribed in a sphere, whose absolute stage was the point in its middle. Vitruvius’s plans unfold around the point that was to be contemplated by and from all points of view. The point is the actor, the performer, a moving stage. The theatre has always been a machine for building an interior world. The inside space is a theater built with ruler and pen, starting from the middle point of the stage.

The point of indifference is a weak geometric machine that draws the outside space with the inside space, a dramaturgy of interior duration. It studies exactness with interiority, performance with contemplation, and simplicity with absurdity. A body moving through space becomes a point that must be remembered at every position of its trajectory. A structure emerges only as that which holds vagueness together, at the limit of performance conventions.

Alina Popa navigates between visual arts and contemporary dance, the white cube and the black box, theory and text. She draws with concepts, conceptualizes with movement, moves with thought, thinks with structure, structures with sound, sounds weird or not at all. She gives lectures during parties, documents residencies writing SF, and will, at least once, interrupt a public discussion to talk about jaguars. She founded Artworld together with Florin Flueras in 2012, and The Bureau of Melodramatic Research with Irina Gheorghe in 2009. She contributes to several projects, or “esthetic entities”, such as Bezna [consistent darkness + diffuse fear], Black Hyperbox, Robin Hood Minor Asset Management, Postspectacle. Her work was shown mostly in Europe, but also in Brazil and more recently in China.

Spoils – Adriana Gheorghe
When you see this, doubt the subject that you are shaped into by what is visible and languaged and safe. I devoted myself to hiding most of what I address to you, getting in and out of subjectivities and of theatre. You’ll be comforted to know that something else is hiding me.

Do not leave me alone, trip away with me into that lingering stuff. The portal is open. Yes, you.
Spoils?
Spoils is something taken from another by craft or force.
Call it ‘Prey and Pray’. Make it clear.
No.

Adriana Gheorghe dedicates and surrenders herself to performance making and performative writing. She gives unapologetic Grave Lectures, immerses just as unapologetically and gravely in other people’s work as work method; disturbs performative parties with emergency whispers or ear-whispers secrets about the end of the world and constantly researches ways of working with verbal language that both spoil and accompany understanding. She spends way too much time inside the black box, and with Henry James, and is deeply committed to a Black Hyperbox that encourages overlapping (i)realities in order for its necessary inconsistencies to shine. She showed work at Atelier 35 București, PAF St-Erme, Brut Vienna, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, National Center of Dance Bucharest, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, ZKM Karlsruhe.

Synthetic Sophisms – Ioana Gheorghiu
Testing reductions with an affinity for maximum synthesis: not necessarily false, but necessarily insufficient. There is nothing else but sound.

Following essentialization methods, speech is reduced to intonation, revealing the relation between content, sound and affect within speech. What is challenged is the notion that music is not semantically charged (apart from particular musical sequences that are acknowledged to have explicit function, like the military march). The relation between rhythm and knowledge assimilation as conveyed by studies on musicality of speech sets the premises of an environment where sound is performing speech and intonation has autonomous meaning. Working within the confines of this environment means testing perspectives on various connections between memory and sound (especially rhythm) as mediated by movement.

Ioana Gheorghiu is employing the tropes of visual arts and music rehearsals to read into the time based modalities of dance and black box performance. Sliding from the approach of performativity pertaining to white cube, she is working lately within the black box temporality. Current projects look into affect as embedded in the musicality of speech, reduction methods (sound or movement exercises to obtain maximum of synthesis), reasoning overdoses. She participated in exhibitions and presented individual and group performances at Rosas Studios Brussels, National Center of Dance Bucharest, Lateral Art Space – The Paintbrush Factory Cluj, The Cultural Center of Chorbadjisko, The Immunology Laboratory Bucharest, Atelier 35 Bucharest, Platforma Space Bucharest, Alfred ve dvoře Theatre Prague, CIAC Pont-Aven.

Artificial Emotional Intelligence – Florin Flueraș
The current science and technology can foresee an AI with some capacities equal or superior to those of humans – attention, perception, use of language, intelligence, imagination. But this kind of AI would be a philosophical zombie, not capable of experiencing its capacities. It can perform subjectivity, emotions and mental states, without living and feeling them. Emotions are seen as the most human, the one component that technology cannot have. But at the same time they are openings for structural changes in the deep abstractions that constitute the frames of realities, in this sense, the most unhuman and abstract. 

AEI is not so much about seeing an artwork through one’s esthetic capacities. It is more that affecting those esthetic capacities becomes the work. It is not so much about criticizing or revealing submissions to mediums. It is more about using the submissive predispositions to create environmental changes and artificial dispositions. It is not about importing and exploring a new technology in art. It is more about finding abstract far away correspondences with new technological approaches and forms of thinking.

Florin Flueras works with performance, text and the creation of “esthetic entities”. The entities are complex compositions of people, concepts, processes, capacities, frames – artworks as artworlds. Artworld, Black Hyperbox, Dead Thinking, Dreaming the End of Dreaming, Postspectacle, Presidential Candidacy, Collapse Yoga, Artificial Emotional Intelligence, Real Virtual Reality are some of the projects and entities developed and presented in different international contexts in the last years. He is currently interested in how approaches and forms of thinking from new technologies could be abstractly explored in apparently unrelated art practices. A dynamic of speculative alienation from concepts through practices and from experience through concepts is constantly part of his work.

Works developed with the support of National Dance Center Bucharest, Station Belgrade and 4Culture.