A reaction by Home_Mynther_Mikalsen_Marhaug_Murray_Leslie

Text/Voice: Stewart Home – London

Piano Improv and Video Edit: Thies Mynther – Hamburg

Realtime Drawing Response: Mikalsen & Marhaug – Trondheim

Part of the Corona Lockdown Improv Sessions curated by Alexandra Murray-Leslie

Documentation from one of the performances in the VIRAL IN THE VIRUS series.

Forced to go online; away from the physical and analog – into the shady non-physical and digital.

A hysterical response to covid-19, from a blogger too popular to handle her fame.

The sound piece “Too cool for Corona” looks into the contemporary experience economy and successfully considers what originality is today, in our heavily commodified and remixed digital culture (with which the work engages with, on a critical level and simultaneously becomes a part of). The work has several complex layers of meaning (and does not just rest upon being ironic), one being it’s engagement with questioning the notions of the attention economy, understanding that paying attention is a currency of today’s internet, by engaging with this, the work also questions ideas of value and meanings of art today.

Several weeks into quarantine the three artists find themselves delving into involuntary self-reflection, portraying and wondering upon their new everyday.

Credits:
Video: Markus Nymo Foss
Video edit: Tuva Holm Nymo
Sound edit: Einar Grind
Guinea Pig Caretaker: Jørgen Johan Wassvik
In collaboration with Artemis and Amfi

I have been determining my value on the basis of my appearance and I really wanted to identify what led me to do that. An audio/video loop, starring a tummy tucker and myself as a medium to dissect the number of times I have intentionally caused myself discomfort to look a certain way.⁣ This video is for anyone who feels the pressure and oppression of beauty.⁣

It is contemporary, in this very moment, Coronavirus is happening, eating, hurting humankind. It is unpredictable. It is fast; I made the film on 12th February, the virus outbreak in Italy did not happen yet, the Scandinavia was not yet infected; People in the video were saying that Europe might be safe. It is time-based, it is the history that is happening.

This is everything about Coronavirus taking over the dominating power from human, and forced us to change lifestyles, to be aware of the air, the environment. How we should respect the capability of nature, how we protect our kind and coexist with a global health crisis. As a human, I have to discuss it in my artistic practice. Because of the rise of racism also is creating another level of cultural abuse, the virus became an excuse for racists and damaging the process of civilization.

“If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.

Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.” [1]

On this level, I tend to think that nature has its consciousness as an entirety. From the Stone Age, the Iron Age to the Machine Age, humans have transformed nature more and more intensely; from the awe of earth to overpower nature, nature has tardily become a tool from a god in the eyes of humankind. Three hundred years of industrial civilization is the civilization of humankind conquering nature, social productivity is advancing, and humankind is demanding nature unprecedentedly. Still, people gradually forget: nature is not an object; natural life is closely linked with the presence of human society. In a sense, the earth is priming an immune response to humans. It began to respond to parasites, and the human infestation seemed like a bad infection. Europe, Japan, and the United States are like cancer foci, teeming with replicating primates, and the human community is expanding and spreading in ways that could lead to extinction.

Robbins, Jim. (2012). The Ecology of Disease. The New York Times

https://www.qianhuiart.com/viral-viral

2019

Sound Installation 06:19

In Abyss We Live is a sound piece that leads to an uncomfortable meditation experience and traumatic thoughts. It is the opposite of relaxing and spiritual practice, in this session we will follow the digital guide and navigate to the deepest fear. This piece was originally installed in Storvika, a Norwegian fjord.

A short audio journey with Tibetan singing bowls. Connect us to the peace in us.

Date created: 28/5/2020

7 mins 30 sec sound piece