RHYTHMS OF PRESENCE

Artistic research project carried out under the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, a PhD programme at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2013-2017).

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Artistic research project Rhythms Of Presence focuses its attention on the (in)visible manifestations of bodily presence as an acoustical and temporal  phenomenon. Through the process of capturing the rhythms of everyday steps or listening to an ambiance of a place in order to re-articulate and displace them in various ways, this project explores the poetic, aesthetic and philosophical potentialities of the omnipresent infra-ordinary rhythms of everyday life. Bringing these rhythms to the fore in the settings of several rhythmical, sonic and spatial situations, hybrid places of intersection between presence and absence, concrete and abstract, here and somewhere else are established. This in order to explore how these re-articulations might manifest presence beyond the directness of visuality and vicinity, and further, what kind of new poetics they might form.

The project Rhythms Of Presence attends to the opaque within the visible, the hidden in plain sight, and the inaudible within the audible in focusing on human bodily presence as it manifests outside of and beside subjectivity, sociality, identity, and meaning as a rhythmical expression. It thereby engages in listening to human bodily presence from a non-human point of listening, uncovering the otherness embedded and hidden within the self and articulating it as series of rhythmical, sonic, and spatial situations. These situations embody the otherness we all share as a possibility to reconfigure the relations between the self, other, and world not defined through classification, signification, and representation of the other, but acted out as relations of “being with” and “passing by” the other, recognizing itself as the other.