Fictitious Situations IV

Sound: Miha Ciglar
Video: Nika Autor
Movement: Tina Valentan

It is becoming increasingly clear that different European foundations and organisations that finance culture and art focus their support on projects that follow the ideology and tendencies of the European Union politics. Both the artists and cultural producers adjust and reconcile their ideas and positions to the cultural policies of the European Union only to be able to continue with their artistic work. The majority of these projects neither deals with nor reveals any in-depth reflection of their alleged content. So, who are the authors, what is their job?
Seated on the stage, the dancer performs the choreography only with facial expression. The camera, attached to her head, captures the image of her face and we can follow the movement of facial muscles by way of a real time image analysis programme. The movements of the dancer’s lips trigger the pre-recorded interpretation of the text, namely the application documentation and content directives by a selected European cultural foundation to grant subsidies to art projects. By moving her eyes, the dancer modulates the sound of the recorded text, thereby expressing that minimal freedom in the interpretation of the predetermined content that the artist in today’s world of culture financing still possesses.

www.irzu.org

Miha Ciglar is a composer and researcher in the area of audio technologies. He holds a BA from the Academy of Music and the University of Technology in Graz, Austria. Since 2001, he presents his compositions for different acoustic instruments as well as electro-acoustic and interactive-dance performances and audio-visual installations at art festivals all over the world. Lately, he has focused on performance art, which he compounds with designing new concepts for musical instruments. His work is marked with the intertwinement of interaction methods and music information retrieval procedures and the development of systems for time pattern recognition (music structures, gestures, and choreographies) in real time. In 2008, Ciglar founded an interdisciplinary Institute for Sound Art Research-IRZU. He is the initiator and curator of the international festival of sound art EARZoom, which took place in May 2009 in the frame of IRZU.

Tina Valentan completed her studies at Theaterschool - School for New Dance Development (SNDD) in Amsterdam in 2007. She has presented her dance knowledge in various national and international performances, with which she has toured extensively and appeared at festivals, such as City Of Women Festival, Pitch Wise, Act Festival Bilbao, Its Festival Amsterdam, Masdanza Gran Canaria, Nagib, Gibanica, Platforma, and 4GO (programme of Krisztina De Chatel Dance Company), etc. She is currently collaborating with Miha Ciglar and Nika Autor.

Nika Autor studied at the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In 2005/06, she has attended a further training programme at Satakunta Polytechnic Fine Art Kankaanpaa in Finland, and in the years 2006/2007 at the Academy of Fine Arts Poznan in Poland (department of photography). In her works, she draws from different areas, including photography, graphic design, video, and painting - with the common denominator of social engagement. Her artistic focus lies in the relation of the artist toward her/his immediate environment.