Spaces of the In-Between : Teleportation & Transformation

Περίληψη

In our western understanding, stories of teleportation and transformation in principle consist of three stages: the state before, the in-between moment (the shift) and the state after. The middle part is where the blurry boundaries of what we commonly call “reality” and “fiction” lay: the boundaries of awareness, trust and believing. The in-between moment is a moment of trespass, change, shift, a moment often invisible. What exactly happens after Gregor Samsa falls asleep as a human and before he wakes up as an insect or what happens right after Alice steps into the mirror and before she enters Wonderland? What happens while Clark Kent is inside the phone booth? None of these events occur in plain sight, but in a liminal space, where a device (τέχνασμα: technasma) activates the process. They occur in an instant, bound by the Aristotelean time paradox.

How to deal with the presence of the body in terms of time and space during this in–between moment and how to stimulate imagination, memory and the senses towards the “impossible”, using the elements that define a teleportation/transformation device? To deal with the questions, I had extensive discussions with experts in the field (children, people with schizophrenia and people in love), supported by the investigation of the “daily-life” realm as well as the analysis of my personal experience (autoethnographic self-investigation).

Through a compositional, experimental methodology, this speculative transdisciplinary artistic research project looks into means of (s)low-tech immersive arts, exploring im/possibilities through storytelling and technologies of the bodymind, seeing no clear boundaries between the performative space and the daily life realm with its physical and metaphysical properties. It navigates the nostalgia for a past and a future as a continuum, contributing to ongoing conversations about the artist/researcher’s existence, their agency and their ability for interconnectedness and change.