We! The temporary nation.
Piotr Wyrzykowski’s and Echo Ho’s project provoke a post-digital dance ritual, which emphasizes selfless collective creation, encouraging people to forget mobile screens, and re-enact the idea of connectedness by activate bodily movements and collaboration. This situation fosters otherness, as the emerging community draws on originality, distinctness and diversity of the individuals comprising it. The resulting dance-and-musical event is prosocial and educational, while the technology it employs is utopian in character.
Temporary Nation is a platform for organizing group and individual performative sessions. The work draws on active participation of its audience who become its co-creators through the use of an app designed for the purposes of this performance. Once the app has been installed, particpants’ smartphones turn into light- and sound-emitting audiovisual gadgets that can be operated by their users through particular gestures or choreographies. A joint performance of un unpredictable symphony turns a group of strangers into a temporary community.
Temporary Nation aims to unite people as the performance takes shape through transforming their smartphones into multimedia network instruments. Physical activity and gestures of the participants activate music and images. Thus, a multimedia event is created in real-time. Its final shape, both in terms of choreography and the audiovisual composition, will depend on the number of participants, their dynamics, creativity and ability to work together.
The app used by Temporary Nation is universal in terms of its use – it can be launched outside the official event, also by individual users. However, optimal results that correspond with artistic goals are only achieved when the app is used by a group of users. Participants are not required to know each other in person. The performance can be organized locally, in a place shared by all participants, or globally, where participants can join each other online.
The work results from collaboration between media artist Piotr Wyrzykowski (b. 1968) and performer Echo Ho (b.1973) bringing together Wyrzykowski's experience in creating multimedia performance experiences that are politically as well as technologically cutting-edge with Echo Ho's equally provocative artistic vision in creating audio-video installations, sound art interventions, and intermedia performances that question the artifacts and materiality of global culture. Choreography of the performance was developed in collaboration with choreographer and director Michael Maurissens.
Please come to the event with a charged smartphone with the Android or iOS operating system and the installed Temporary Nation application, which will be available on Google Play and the App Store on 28.02.2018.
Temporary Nation is part of a larger project titled +100. Three works that envison the emerging avant-garde. +100 has been conceived by Roderick Coover, produced and co-curated by Katarzyna Boratyn.
The project is organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme accompanying the centenary of Poland regaining independence.
Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2021.
Partners of the project:
LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art
ON - Neue Musik Köln, funded by the City of Cologne
gerngesehen/Georg Dietzler
Artist bios:
Piotr Wyrzykowski (b. 1968) works with video, multimedia performance, photography, web projects, installation, and screenings in public space. Wyrzykowski has held over 40 performances to date. He made his debut in 1990 with an extensive action piece of the art duo Ziemia Mindel Würm (formed with Marek Rogulski). In 1995, exploring the medium of mass performance, Wyrzykowski co-founded the art collective C.U.K.T. (Central Office of Technical Culture). Its major achievement was the development of the Electoral Citizen Software in 1999, a computer program for collective decision-making and an element of a socio-political project promoting Wiktoria Cukt, a digital character, as a candidate for the post of the president of Poland. Wyrzykowski’s performances employed video art and TV broadcasts. He was particularly interested in the impact of new technologies on human life (Cyborg’s Sex Manual) as well as the new avenues for artistic practice they create. Using modern techniques, the artist looks at the process of digital transformation of the reality and the emergence of virtual worlds (There Is No Body). His video works also combine an exploration of the medium with its documentary character. After 2000, Wyrzykowski’s work addressed themes at the crossroads of life and politics, analyzing the influence of the mass media on these fields (collaboration with the Ukrainian artist Iliya Chichkan). He also explores the technique of video-poster (Communostalgie, Only Those Who Planned It Will Survive). Wyrzykowski’s video Beta Nassau (1993) is in the collection of MoMA, New York. The artist was awarded first prize at the International Media Art Festival WRO’95, and second prize at WRO’97. He was also nominated for the first edition of Views— Deutsche Bank Foundation Award, co-organized by Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. Web: www.peterstyle.eu
Echo Ho (b.1973) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer born in Beijing who lives and works in Cologne. Her artistic practice includesaudio-video installations, sound art interventions, intermedia performances. In Ho’s artwork, the modular construction creates an onomatopoeically distorted, poetically strange and “un-homely” world, consisting of subjective experiences and the search for a homeland, but also of globalized artifacts, often shows a complex migration context and conceptual links between culturally diverse materials and artistic disciplines. Ho re-invented the oldest traditional Chinese string instrument »Gu Qin«, turning it into a »Slow Qin,« and allowing it to become a wireless interface for controlling computer digital music software. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, Center-A Vancouver, ISEA 2010 Germany, ZKM Karlsruhe, among others. She was a fellow of the interdisciplinary “Graduate School for Arts and Sciences” at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2007 to 2013, she was an assistant professor at Media Academy of Media Arts Cologne and taught in the area of sound and electronic media. Since 2016, Ho has created her new musical alias ZO-ON SLOWS. Web: www.goechospace.com [Attention! The page opens in a new tab.]