Fall Apart Without Awareness

a reading of Lundahl & Seitl - Symphony of A Missing Room

If lining out similarity and difference between an event and an experience, then I might claim that, to an event, I cannot attribute predicates neither before nor during the moment the event happens. It happens as a struggle for experience rather than already being an experience. It presupposes an incommensurability of several elements while those elements might have been totally irrelevant to previous modes of perception. Events create attention towards perception. Unlike, experience might function entirely inside of previous perception logics, experience can immediately be called pleasure, warmth, love, tickle, violence, fear and so on. I admit, of course, that experience can offer sensitivity or awareness towards unexpected things, but exactly here the shit hits the fan: is it about attention towards perception or about awareness? What do we aspire to? Do we fall and fail and try again to catch the possible or do we waft around every possible phenomena through awareness? Let's suppose we're cool and smart and have no fear.

Symphony of a missing room can be read as exactly taking a turn towards awareness in the middle of the performance while having had a kickstart with layering visual, auditive and tactile perception of space, performance and body in the beginning. While having the eyes open and watching the actual museum space, the reclaimed virtual space stays present through exactly not being named. It appears only in my own desperate attempt of handling the different proposed layers. Tiny moments of the sensations and impressions making a different sense fleeting through the air. Following a strict proposal of watching, listening, feeling incompatible phenomenas, creating possibilities of scenes instead of consistent realities or, let's say, producing reality as a loose momentary construction, I would call engaging into being cool and having no fear – no fear of having nothing to say about what you perceive. The shit does hit the fan precisely. Clouds explode and the sky lightens purple, performance performs.

The later twist though identifies a virtual space with some random imagination. That might not even bother me too much as a proposal itself, if it wouldn't fall in the most common trap of contemporary democracy/experience/creativity economy: the performance wants to open space for personal imagination (which doesn't have anything to do with virtuality or creation of something different) and yet doesn't get its stuff together to try. It is ambitious on offering me an experience and, therefore, keeps on bringing me back to the creator's own imaginary space, teasing me to develop an image of the space and, in the next step, through the audio guide, leading me back to an imagined forest – some kind of björk empire that, in deed, is not compatible with my virtual space. This as a sidekick, moreover the created frustration by gentle but persistent reprehension through voices or hands of the team, reminds too much of neoliberal education strategies („Be creative! We will lead you back on the prescribed and supposedly right way anyway.“) or self-education for making me loose physical or mental integrity.

I say: no generosity on the experience. Make it impossible and I will fall apart without awareness.

Juli Reinartz