ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES (working title, formerly: magnetics in-material)
The contents of this page are protected by Intellectual Property and Copyright Laws. Images and Ideas contained or attached to this page cannot be used by individuals or organisations without direct prior written permission, license, or agreement given by Mari Amman Studio (Rachel Wolfe). The first published page was in 2015, followed by 2019 and 2023. Reviewers please refer to the PDF linked here: 2023_Project Proposal
MOTIVATION
Form geologically rooted narratives to reexamine human relationships and activities with the environment. Artistic research created from scientific methods performs as a facilitator of plurality and innovation through epistemological, ecological, economic, political, behavioural, and spiritual insights.
I began working on this proposal after completing a Master of Fine Art in Los Angeles and moving to Norway in 2015. With the intention for art to address widespread concerns in colonialism, globalism, and sustainability, I developed a workable method for iterative site study to generate geological empathy.
By sourcing geologic, paleomagnetic and geomagnetic resonance research to create woven tapestries, the resulting artworks provide a backdrop, a textural and visual reference for scientific, innovation, economic, and political conversations, as well as addressing social dynamics relative to migration and place making.
Furthermore, I am motivated to create ways cultural movements can harmonise and innovate through tensions in the ways history is framed and viewed, and applied through engineering, economics, society, and commerce. Working with traditions in art and craft, geological research and data to make machine woven tapestries, the invisible and ineffable relationships between the earth and sun become both tactile and relatable.
Making the invisible matter recorded by resonant sciences tactile and visible, the subjective feeling of places becomes the ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES woven into tapestries. Creating geological and geopolitical empathy in navigating difficult conversations simultaneously engages in analysis and feeling.
The proposal realises the role of an artist in the technological age as steward and performer through field work, translator of data, and colleague with scientists and public officers. The specific data compiled by researchers at UiO the NGU within Norway, as well as the global network of resonances research scientists makes the artistic research open to nearly limitless possibilities to reveal ways technology, logistics, cybernetics, aviation, agriculture, history, archiving, migration, commerce, societal structures can be touched by traditional and contemporary craft and performance.
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FORMAL AND OBJECTIVE SUMMARY
The project aims to engage directly in the ethics and morality the human choices at every level, providing examples and test models future innovations in cross disciplinary studies, culture production, sustainable inventions, social policies and commerce.
Studying specific sites, allows several of the Platonic Forms of Beauty, Movement and Time to be observed through what is right in front of us. Instead of an ideological drive prone to missing details, the objective is to examine the ways answers to present day issues may have been right in front of us. By reexamining the recorded layers of invisible emanations, data from magnetic resonances are translated into experiencing new understandings in the changes within and on earth.
The artistic research bridges the work of scientists with the public. Paleomagnetism, remnant magnetism, and resonance studies impact the ways geologically rooted stories foster deeper consideration and pluralistic understanding. The final, visually abstract translations of the data are planned for educationally decorative use in public buildings and offices, as well as scenographic art for interaction with musicians, dancers, and audiences. The tapestries invite people to reflect deeply on the ways invisible forces are always present and involved with the human body and everyday life.
Creating a visual language from invisible emanations is intended to be iterative and multilayered. Studying multiple sites organised through topology, depth, dating (to be determined during production). Working with resonances to create material out of the immaterial. The methods in ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES involves collaboration with scientists, musicians, and dancers, opening possibilities for education, economic, environmental, and political applications.
As a visual and performance artist, with expertise in photography, space planning, lighting, materials and communications, I work with colour and texture as cultural makers of meaning. Relating site specific, objective measurements used in science and technology creates new layers of meaning. Ulldagen provided insights into my interest to cooperate with local farmers and companies in natural fibre creation. UiO scientists working internationally have engaging insights to share with the public. ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES provides a unique intersection of tradition and innovation in visual, tactile, imaging, lineage, history, and dynamic sciences.
BACKGROUND, CONTEXT, GOALS, METHODS
Growing from my formative years in a rural environment, training in classical dance and music (piano and voice), graduate work at Otis College of Art and Design, informed by the Frankfurt School’s critical social theories, independent study in Rationality and Irrationality, assisting art history courses in Modernism to Conceptualism and Photography, studies in imaging and social psychology in Ehime, Japan, interest in ethical textile production, lifelong curiosities in geology, physics, and biology, into an artistic research practice made my view of art a result of combining of scientific methods and skills.
In the context of contemporary installation, sculpture, music, design, performance and visual arts, A.I., conservation, photography and imaging, 1970’s American Land Art, my previous work with Virtual Material, Making Sense Master Fine Art thesis, and Pattern Recognition project were foundational to the multidisciplinary methods proposed for ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES.
My goal of working with nature, instead of dominance of nature is rooted in a pragmatic, structuralist approach. Using materials, technologies, and experiences to analyse anthropological and future driven narratives in relationships between human and environment, ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES posits the question: what makes places and people? in an objective and subjective artistic research involving the gamut of senses: sound, space, touch, light, time to:
- Create ways to repurpose existing technologies to study the aetiologies of social behavior.
- Look into ways earth-based perspectives in culture and material production support cultural harmony more effectively than prescribed narratives in identity politics.
- Explore ways geographic and geopolitical empathy are established through cultural experiences.
- Research the efficacy of cultural production in scientific cooperation.
- Ethical revaluation of subsumed labor and socio-economic situations for new future solutions.
- Join research, data, and art provide overlooked insights to sustainable and benevolent cultural movements purely data-driven models and siloed research may overlook.
Transforming technologies for resource mining and geological surveying into tools for relating the significance of the land with the people, ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES looks into the resonances of the earth. By emphasising the pragmatic actualities within the earth, a lens and narrative of compassionate understanding can be woven. The model of ‘artist as organiser of synesthetic sense information’, makes the interdisciplinary art-research project a unique fusion of structural and systematic methods in recording, sound, textile production, scientific presentations and ongoing performances.
- Make site-specific, colourful textile visualisations, based on remnant magnetism from site-specific recordings.
- Build upon 1970’s Land Artists and Indigenous performance traditions.
- Explore materials: wool, alpaca, copper, lab generated materials using wood or mycelium and production methods such as weaving machines or hacking old printers that to weave the tapestries.
- Measuring actualities of landscapes through remnant magnetism.
- Final textiles, likely topological in appearance, exhibited in art, public installation and decoration, performance scenography’s, potential model for ethical commerce, with a connection to actual scientific research.
- New insights to scientific fields by examining aberrant data and creative perspectives on resource mining and historic dating technologies.
- Site-specific textiles make invisible phenomena tactile and visible.
- Exploring ways to generate and make frequencies visible and experiential.
- Open and structured methods inform human and environmental relationships through well-being. Instead of information being used to exploit nature, the recordings are transformed into ways people can relate with bodies and nature, using all the senses.
ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES in today’s context, uses technologies already utilised for science and mining toward an artistic and spiritual motive of finding more harmonious choices with nature. Another aim in the methods is to avoid heuristic errors common within siloed logic and data analysis.
Similar to prior invisible but real phenomena such as the curvature of the earth, cell function, presence of bacteria or viruses struggled to become understood as Intuitive (common sense/knowledge), ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES looks at the ways invisible phenomena of places make people. In that Intuitive (common sense/knowledge) must be founded in something (f)actual to be considered reason, the project proposes a significant ethical area of the morality of human behaviours relative to their environments and each other. Through carefully considered repetition, weaving invisible emanations of places through the visual tactility of textiles, the project aims to create understandings of that which is within and around us.
As an interdisciplinary art-research project involving art and craft, geological sciences, technological work, sound, performance, etiological and anthropological imaging structures as textiles, the results offer poetic and empirical experiences, from a ground-up approach:
- Understanding of complexities through experience.
- Reprieve from alienation, by creating common ground and belonging, through a nature connection.
- Temporal and sensorial reminders of wholeness and warmth in relation with nature and history.
- Making ephemeral realities both visually and physical tactile.
- Deepening physical relating with places and peoples.
- Sharp textures and vague concepts become soft, direct experiences.
- Direct experience of invisible magnetic resonances through physically engaging materials.
The processes based on the theory of how places making people, formed out of the established field of Pattern Recognition, and research of magnetic phenomena. Magnetics are related to knowledge production in physics, the ontological question of existence whether or not humans observe the phenomenon. The process therefore involves ideas on documentation to bring human understanding into greater sensitivity with nature.
The pursuit of an earth-based narrative from a geological perspective of time allows the art-research to reveal new valences in epistemologies, while repairing alienation by making the realms of the invisible and imaginary both visible and tactile. Woven fibres offering additional qualities such as sound, sound dampening and sound channeling. In creating a cultural way to connect with movements deep within the earth through vision, touch, and experience, ÆSTHETIC RESONANCES weaves traditions in art with emerging technologies in music, sound, media, environments, and social psychology.
To achieve greater harmony with each other and the environment, the iterative research and production model, offers a platform for scientists to speak and disseminate their knowledge, while the woven tapestries becomes a language of and for the earth. Examining ideas within narratives in progress, another goal is to see and touch physical and ideological realities. Realising iterative, palpable visualisations of elemental emanations, to reveal ways human development and behaviour are formed in social contexts of pragmatic work.
Refinement is to emerge throughout the research and continue for as many years as needed after. The remnant magnetic data from research organisations, such as: UiO, NGU and International Geosciences, will be used to create textiles and performances. Jacquards can be made with TC2 Loom or other weaving technologies. The two-sided method creates positive-negative, interrelated surfaces similar to analogue photography, and is an important distinction from using knots, knitting, or sublimation printing. Another possibility is cooperating with software developers and coders to make textile printers from defunct machinery. Demarcated by textures and colours woven based on recordings from measuring devices often used in resource mining, the subtle pre-formative forces of magnetism become Visual, Sensual (tactile), and Actual (woven). Connecting anthropogenic sensibilities to technological developments lays a common ground toward the future with a holistic vision of healthy symbiosis. Instead of a dominance based vision, textiles based on records of magnetic forces offer new understandings. Methods of textile production afford additional sites of meaning by exploring sustainable production of materials, use of mycelium and experimental fibres, in the resulting tapestries for installations, government buildings, or scenography for cultural performances with musicians and dancers. The aim is to produce as many site specific textiles and performances as appropriate.
PROCESS AND REFLEXIVE DOCUMENTATION
Form a visual database and media materials, alongside scientific archiving and research used for industrial and resource mining. Recontextualise the data in textile and engaging performances. Documentation of the process including photography of the researchers and sites, videos, presentations, databases, textiles, and performances will also be produced. The project can serve as a grounds for establishing a company to bridge gaps between science, art, commerce, and rural cultures with cities. Collaborations with musicians, choreographers and dancers, also realise the research project as a unique basis for collaboration, improvisation within a structure, and documentation in the form of videos, images, charts, cultural impressions/experiences.
- Gather and Organise Geographic and Resonance Data (UiO Paleo-geomagnetic lab agreement)
- Establish Structure for Project Elements and Publishing
- Generate a Database of Texts, Sounds, and Visual Translations
- Convert Geologic Frequencies into Sounds and Colour Spectrums in an Aesthetic Database
- Experimentation with Textiles for Conductivity, Sound, and Luminance Materials
- Programming for Machine Output and Materialisation
- Finalised Textile Production Through Machine Weaving
- Publishing of Project Elements and Results
- Public Exhibition and Performance
PROVISIONAL TIME TABLE AND WORK PLAN
Year One
- Gather magnetic resonant recordings with scientists
- Organise/establish a database of recordings, production structure, web archives, and documentation
- Color-frequency assignments forms a reference database
- Textile designs from this database
- Material Experimentation: Conductivity, Sound, Luminance
- Choreography for 5 dancers
- Produce Digitally Woven Samples
Year Two
- Textile production via digital/machine weaving
- Establish archive for documentation with shared access for institutions (including video) and results
- Choreography for the final exhibition
- Public exhibition and performance
- Finalisation & publishing
- Process for therapeutic or social integration
Year Three +Beyond
- Final textile productions, using machine weaving
- Continue to contribute to archive and publishing of research and results
- Public exhibitions and performances
- Finalisation of pedagogical methodology (with potential therapeutic or social integration uses)
- After initial publication of dissertation and exhibition, continue the processes and production at different sites for exhibitions and performances
BUDGET: POTENTIAL PROJECT RELATED EXPENSES
- Workspace, shipping, textile storage, costs associated with knitting printers or hacking a printer
- Work with the UiO scientists (already have gained permission) and other research institutions.
- Labor (musicians, dancers, assistants) or travel for machine usage: https://www.digitalweaving.no/product/
- Yarns, fibres, experimental materials (ex. copper, fibre optics, wood, lab grown materials)
- Scholarships, Embassy Support, Private Donors, Teaching Fellowships, Public Workshops
- Travel, shipping and insurance for conferences, exhibitions, professional presentations, networking
Images from the Magnetic Resonance Lab. Special thanks to Annique van der Boon and UiO.
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Maps from aggregated data, magnetic powder analysed for cross-referencing study, sample cutting machine.
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RESEARCH
Batchelor, David, Chromophobia, Reaktion Press, 2000.
Batchelor, David, The Luminous and the Gray, Reaktion Press, 2014.
Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyper Reality, Gruppo Editoriale, 1983
Eco, Umberto, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Ghezzo, Marta Arkossy, Solfege, Ear Training, Rhythm, Dictation, and Music Theory: A Comprehensive Course 3rd Edition, University Alabama Press, June 2005.
Giaever, Ivar, The Strange Case of Global Warming, Lecture, 2 July 20212, https://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/recordings/31259/the-strange-case-of-global-warming-2012
Haugeland, John, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, A Bradford Book, 1985.
Johnson, Don, The Protean Body, Harpercollins, 1977.
Klempe, Sven Hroar, Cultural Psychology of Musical Experience, Information Age Publishing, 2016.
Noë, Alva, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, Hill and Wang, September 2015.
Noë, Alva, Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Hill and Wang, February 2009.
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, 1984.
Scarry, Elaine, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Scarry, Elaine, Resisting Representation, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Svenbo, Jesper and Schied John, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric (Revealing Antiquity), 2001.
Tauxe, Lisa, Essentials of Paleomagnetism: Fifth Web Edition, 2021.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. M.D., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Penguin Random House, September 2014.
Remnant Magnetism, https://www.britannica.com/science/remanent-magnetism
Norske Geologiske Undersøkelse, https://www.ngu.no
SEAS, Moss http://www.seas.no Remanent magnetism (Paleomagnetism) or the permanent magnetism in rocks, resulting from the orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of rock formation in a past geological age is the source of information for the paleomagnetic studies of polar wandering and continental drift. Remanent magnetism can derive from several natural processes. This arises when magnetic minerals forming in igneous rocks cool through the Curie point and when the magnetic domains within the individual minerals align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field, thus making a permanent record of its orientation. A second mechanism operates when small grains of magnetic minerals settle into a sedimentary matrix, producing detrital remanent magnetism. It is hypothesised that the tiny grains orient themselves in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field during deposition and before the final consolidation of the rock. The magnetism thus introduced appears to persist through later alteration and compaction of the rock. Rocks may acquire remanent magnetism in at least two other ways: (1) rocks made up of nonmagnetic minerals chemically altered to yield magnetic minerals, and these newly formed minerals acquire remanent magnetism in the presence of the Earth’s magnetic field; (2) igneous rocks already cooled may acquire remanent magnetism by a process called viscous magnetisation. The difference between these types of remanent magnetism can be determined; magnetic history of a particular rock can therefore be interpreted via 6 types of magnetisation: (1) diamagnetism, (2) paramagnetism, (3) ferromagnetism, (4) anti-ferromagnetism, (5) ferrimagnetism, (6) superparamagnetism.
SELECTED ARTISTS OF INFLUENCE
Jennifer Steinkamp’s algorithmically generated trees and movements.
Bill Viola’s body of work on interiority using sound and visuals.
Kari Hjertholm’s and Anne Stabell’s textile, visual and material artworks.
Sarah Charlesworth’s work on ways images influence our lives.
Camille Norment’s sound performances and installations.
Lindsay Seer’s multimedia installations.
Twyla Tharp’s work in dance.
Peter Fischei and David Weiss’s systemic structures to create eventual outcomes.
Michael Snow’s oeuvre of works using music, installation, and multimedia
Nina Torp’s work with anthropological site digs to inform sculptures.
Christina Kubisch work with sound generating textiles.
Daniela Bergschneider’s sculptural work with Visual Tactility.
Peter Knudsen’s compositions in music and jazz improvisation.
Mudi Hachim’s work with clay, sound, water and Sumerian artefacts.
Seshen’s “Lineage” thesis and body choir workshops with voice and dance.
Ingrid Aarset’s work with textiles and technology.
Nina Rodin’s multimedia work with daily documentation and iterative performances.
Kimsooja’s multimedia installations on traditions in contemporary experiences.
Lygia Pape and Lygia Clarke, for their contributions to performances using textiles and groups of human bodies.
Pedro Gomez-Egaña for the spiritual in the technological age.
Amanda Steggel’s, Mind the Gap, work with synthesia and for mapping the way sounds relate to colors and energy centres of the body.
Dorothea Tanning’s surrealistic experiences in tactile, formal, pictorial and spacial.
Live Bugge’s, The Other Wild, behavioural boundaries and transgressions.
Katrine Koster Holst’s work on the landscape changing over time.
Geir Harald Semuelsen’s work with light.
Francesca Capone’s direct, literal, blocks discerning patterns,
FOUNDATIONAL PROJECTS
The selected art and research made during residencies, with musicians, artists, and researchers is shared to establish my commitment and history. I work to place non-violent orientations within cultures by deconstructing the apparatus of photography, examining allegory, and understanding behavior from biological and social constructs. The projects look into byproducts of systems and assumptions, opening conversations for international colleagues in the Nordics, USA, EU, Asia, in fields of academia, conservation, agriculture, engineering, UX/UI, Human Genetic/Genome projects, architecture, civil engineering. https://mariamman.net/
Videos: https://mariamman.net/category/videos/
Selected Art-research: https://mariamman.net/category/artistic-research/
PhD Proposal Project Outline: https://mariamman.net/aesthetic-resonances/
Body Line, 2021, video, with Oh No Noh and Zainab Alarab (DE) for an exhibition in the Netherlands during corona lockdowns. The water nymph archetype exemplifies agency and subjectivity in context of a health and social crisis.
Afjordance, 2019, video, body meets wire frame generation algorithmic composition collaboration with Harald De Bondt (DE). Choreography based on Pattern Recognition process drawing. Took up concepts used in A.I. development: Affordance and Pattern Recognition. for humanistic, philosophical and psychological discourses. AWMAS Conference, UCSB, 2020
Solfége Souche, 2018, video, realises forms of body and forest in a narrative of light, looking at the audible and material ways identification distracts or attracts significance as well as assumptions about nature. Mentored by John Wager (DK).
Mouvements, 2015 – ongoing, photo/installation, look at the ways oil, water, gas resources intersect visual information as technologies coincide with innovations in screen and navigation interfaces. The aesthetic makes an iridescence influence by holoscopic principles, permanent public installations in the works.
Teknovisuell Experience, 2015 – ongoing, photo/installation, began as a way to expose the losses and reformations in information uploads and downloads through the internet. One of the details was permanently installed at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA.
Pattern Recognition, 2015 – ongoing, artistic research method and pedagogical tool. The process was developed for the fundamental artistic research methods, as well as developing language around relating subjectivity and environment, or the body with the landscape psychologies.
Sublime Timescapes, 2000 – ongoing, photo, image documentation project utilising the camera as a means to send ourselves back obscured information about our relationship with time and nature of the mind.
Omniscient, 2015, photo, from Making Sense thesis exhibition. The monolithic image and poetic text of Imagining a New EuEurasia exhibition in Gwangju, South Korea.
Suspended Planes, 2015, installation, placed 2 acrylic panels in a room with a video projection of a hand touching a hand, to understand the ways image making obscures visual materials, and the erasures of potential virtual realities reemerge subliminal or inverted fantasies.
Making Sense, 2015, installation, researching the philosophy in photographic imaging technology including WWI history, social policy, cultural and economic leveraging of consumer goods and creative capital.
Damocles, 2019 – ongoing, sculptures with found materials, The nature of relationships and visual knowing of weight, softness, histories of pain, punishment, abjection as well as beauty, peculiarity and purpose.
Underwater Prism, 2016 – , sculpture mockup with glass, water, prism, photography gel to look at ways objects can be hidden in plain sight.
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Privacy, GDPR, internet laws and regulations to access and storage of data, legal consent, public information, and privacy of individual contributions will be considered. Translating data must be understood from the perspective of artistic choices, underlined by the effort to maintain elemental integrity. Considering subjectivity in processes borrowed from scientific methodology, actual realised results cannot be considered wholly objective. This shall be acknowledged, questioned, written, and shared in presentations, publications, and future developments from the project(s). The research methodologies to be considered as critical or negotiable features for future research methodologies and with the possibility for other institutional use, pedagogical developments in the realm of private or government institutions, or public domain. The research and pedagogical approach developed during the project are free to be used for running workshops and courses alongside the project. These courses can be used for enriching local cultural exchange, as an educational resource and site for additional funding of the project. Resourcing local production to minimise international shipping or travel expenses. Insurance for the artwork, machines, materials, and data, to be purchased and maintained throughout the duration of the research and productions thereafter. Language, writing, documentation to be reviewed for facts and technical accuracy. The number of unforeseeable ethical considerations will be consulted through the advisory team, faculty, and staff, considering international copyright and intellectual property laws.
Special thanks to the critical support of my parents, family, and friends, as well as mentors and reviewers: Chris Sisson, Nada Miljkovic, Annetta Kapon, Rob Gershom Sprjuit, John Wagner, Lucia Otero, Øyvind Brandtsegg, Ane Vigdis Øverås, Odd-Wiking Rahlff, Peter Knudsen, David Ulansey.
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