Art Without Soul? Embodiment and Historical Performance
Modern performance critics often scorn nineteenth-century actors and musicians, assuming that because they placed emphasis on exaggerated shapes and gestures they were merely showboating—engaging in empty posturing—rather than performing from the soul.
The presentation will explore the thesis of a ‘Cinema of Extractions’, where moving image technology is not seen as primarily a vehicle for film as cinema, but as a continuously evolving technological and aesthetic infrastructure for film as research. The presentation aims to rewire how we see and artistically respond to the film medium’s connection to research in a way that speaks to our contemporary moment of images as part of networks of data extraction, analysis and optimisation. It will discuss contemporary artistic practices that seek to challenge such extractive infrastructures and that build alternatives.
Kristoffer Gansing will enter into a dialogue with the members of ReCNTR, which is an interdisciplinary research centre focused on promoting multimodal and audiovisual research methods in social science and the humanities.
Biography Kristoffer Gansing
Kristoffer Gansing is a media researcher and curator whose current work is on small-scale practices, the techno-aesthetics of infrastructure in audiovisual network culture and artistic research. He was artistic director (2011-2020) of the transmediale festival in Berlin and professor of artistic research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2020-23). He is currently Visiting Professor at Winchester School of Art. With Linda H. Ritasdatter he recently initiated the ongoing project A Video Store after the End of the World and his most recent publication is Homegrown, Outsourced, Organized – Network-based Arts and the Techno-aesthetics of Infrastructure (2023).
More information about ReCNTR here: https://www.recntr.nl/about/
