24 EN [sic]nals – intrapulse
©Marcel Rickli
24
[sic]nals – intrapulse
Installation of a waiting room as an anteroom for Light- and Air-Therapy
intrapulse installs a waiting room in response to the location of the project's premiere: The Schatzalp Hotel Davos.
The hotel is a former sanatorium where people suffering from tuberculosis travelled at the beginning of the 20th century in the hope of being cured by Air and Light Therapy. The lobby of the hotel offers a view of the Davos mountain landscape through a large window front. Guests who book a hotel in the health resort of Davos today can choose to support the ‘myclimate Climate Fund Davos’ by paying a small surcharge and thus take “Verantwortung[...] für die momentan unvermeidbaren CO2-Emissionen [zu übernehmen][:] [d]er Gast wird aktiv und löst mit seinem Engagement Nachhaltigkeitsmaßnahmen im Hotel/Betrieb aus”.[1]
The shift in what a claim to healing or measures of care are directed at – then to the bodies suffering from tuberculosis, today to a health resort that reacts to emissions (for example from hotel operations) – has made us wonder about a current reading of the phrase air and light therapy:
Do we possibly need to widen our view beyond habitual material boundaries of the living to be able to think a patient of Light- and Air-Therapy that does justice to the complexity of what is commonly subsumed under the dichotomy of the living/and its environment?
In the waiting room setting of intrapulse – as an anteroom to Light- and Air-Therapy, so to speak – we invite to a speculative approach to bodies and phenomena that are waiting to be treated here.
We have become accustomed to considering the atmosphere, oceans, soils, and rocks as "environment”, "abiotic”, "physico-chemical”, "external conditions”, "geological". [...] It is because the activities of the beings we classically recognize as living overflow and exceed what we classically recognize as the inanimate world that we must, precisely, revise the idea that this world is inanimate. Sébastian Dutreuil, Gaia is alive
We performed the project once again at the Letzigraben outdoor pool in Zurich. Here we were interested in the former changing rooms as a location – like the Schatzalp, as a glass cube they encourage reflection on the boundaries between inside and outside, the living and its surroundings.
[1] EN: take ‘responsibility[...] for the currently unavoidable CO2 emissions[:] [t]he guest becomes active and triggers sustainability measures in the hotel/business with their commitment’.
PULSE INDICATOR | LIVING/AND ITS ENVIRONMENT
The dramaturgical point of reference for the performance in the attempt to think aesthetically about more than human bodies/phenomena is the taking of the pulse.
The human pulse provides the initial musical orientation. We draw on pieces from the Renaissance and a contemporary composition that refer to the human pulse in their instructions on musical metre. The references differ: In Heinz Holliger's Cardiophonie, the focus is on the tempo and sonority of the human pulse, while the Renaissance pieces focus more on the movement of the human heart as a gesture.
With the help of a tube connection, we ultimately give phenomena from the outside a place in our waiting room. the mechanism functions as a pulse indicator: We generate data with the help of a wind sensor, which informs the pulsation of water in the filled tube system. In the object design, we have orientated ourselves on the feeling/touching of the pulse in humans and on ‘Tactus beating’, a historical practice of making musical time countable for the performing musicians.
HUMDITY VEST
With the help of the Humidity Vest, we initiate a relationship between a plant and a waistcoat wearer that encourages the integration of non-human needs into everyday actions. The waistcoat is reactively switched to the water supply of surrounding houseplants (prepared with a humidity sensor) and inflates when a houseplant within a certain radius suffers from water shortage. With continued inflation, the pressure on the wearer's chest increases. The wearer can only stop the inflation by ensuring the plant's water supply and fulfilling its need for water. among other things, the programmed interaction is based on an interest in how routine processes are modified when they become permeable to needs that are usually (or can be) ignored. The focus is not only on including the needs of non-human actors, but also on moments in which usually ignored needs come into conflict with normative notions of time and space of routine or institutional processes.
(see Diversity Arts Culture Berlin, Crip Time)
Lea Sobbe | Recorder
Eleonora Bišćević |Traverso
Martin Jantzen | Viola da Gamba
Zacarias Maia | Performer
Pascal Lund-Jensen | Object-Design + Sound-Direction
Nora Sobbe | Conception + Object-Design + Scenography
Lea Sobbe | Conception + Musical-Direction
We would like to thank the Medical Collection of the Institute for Evolutionary Medicine (University of Zurich) and in particular Sabina Carraro for the exchange of information in the lead up to the performance.