THE ANGEL’S SHARE / Del gre za angelce
Published on July 14th, 2023Friday, 21st July 2023 at 18.00 from the Nebotičnik cafe -> radio-aural+visual experiment:
Joe Summers and Joe Vaughan THE ANGEL’S SHARE
“All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy” – Henry David Thoreau
The two artists performing live on Friday, 21st July 2023 at 18.00 at a dislocated location in the city, and the audience will be able too follow them via radio receivers and binoculars from the Nebotičnik cafe. Bring your own radio receivers and binoculars!
Opening of site-specific multimedia installation: Friday, 21st July 2023 at 19.00, in Cirkulacija 2, Ajdovščina subway, Ljubljana
The Angel’s Share is an exploration of that which we lose through the transmission of information and our necessary reliance on analogy. Using performance, text and music, transmitted live on FM radio frequencies from another location, the artists seek to draw attention to the qualities of reality which are sacrificed in the process of sending and receiving: The live body becomes the telephonic body, the living voice becomes a throatless noise…
Event is also hosted at the airwaves of Radio Študent, that will take the perfromance into your homes – with 50% loss of information!
https://radiostudent.si/kultura/odprti-termin-za-kulturo/delez-gre-za-angele
Joe Summers and Joe Vaughan are multidisciplinary artists based in Berlin and Bristol respectively.
In 2018, we spent a week in Ljubljana, in the creative nest C2, where we designed a short performance. The idea was to create a physical distance between the performer and the audience – in the field of vision but out of earshot – and to transmit the sound from the performance venue to the audience via FM radio. The play ‘Three Hundred Thousand Souls’ was created – the title was given to us by the participating member Ali, when he was looking at the city from the castle hill and talking about the city’s population. The paper talked about plurality and subjectivity, and among other things, the approaches tried to question general subjects (cities and inhabitants) by describing specific cases – and vice versa.
In the years since then, we have been fortunate to have several opportunities to further develop our work: a book was published that describes our methods in Ljubljana in detail; we participated in a residency in Spain in the so-called “collaboration” with scientists – in the research institute for dark matter, where with some of these methods we drew attention to the qualities of the real world, which are sacrificed in the process of transfer to another medium; and this eventually became the project “The Angel’s Share” – a hybrid installation / performance, which was carried out this year (2022) in a gallery environment in Munich. It was also accompanied by a specific sound composition and a pamphlet of writings related to this topic. In 2023, we plan to further develop the project – with more residences around the world. We are happy that we can bring the project back to its spiritual home – Ljubljana. In about two weeks, we will adapt the work to the local environment, then we will present it publicly.
Angel’s share comes from Scottish tradition while cooking whiskey – a part of alcohol always evaporates. And they say: this is angel’s share…
This piece is a work of geography and of sound. A stretching of performance, across distance, across height, across the empty and the transparent. Through that which is full. We seek to bridge and to distend and find ourselves bridged and distended.
In radio, like the telephone, we are experiencing the “live” over distance. And in experiencing the voice without the body, we lose the contextual information one requires to understand the other in full. Facial expressions, sideways glances, smiles. The smell of sweat as a liar panics. The pulling away of the body as one says goodbye.
Anthony Gritten describes the process of “listening” as the process of overlaying an embodied response to timbre (resonance) with external, contextual signifiers. “in order for the subject to emerge from this timbral event there must be a working through, and this is timbre’s resonance in the body.” (Gritten 2010). The moment sound reaches our ears, we have, at first, a physical response which is then transformed into that which we interpret as having meaning.
“As timbre resonates, it becomes rhythmic”. It is upon this condition of possibility that the subject emerges. Rhythm follows resonance […] opening up towards sense and meaning” (Gritten 2010).
As such, the meaning we derive from sound, the rhythm, is not only influenced by but created by the presence of stimuli other than the sound itself. In short, we hear with our ears, but listen with everything. When sound is broadcast, the contextual information that informs it’s meaning is distorted. Much of it is lost. But the body still listens.
That which is lost can be a gift to the performer and to the audience. And if the folklore of highland distilleries is to be believed, a gift to some celestial other. There is a transmigration of the performing body, into the strange region of the aural, and our audience can map that strangeness onto our small, distant bodies or perhaps their own, or the bodies of the 300,000 souls who circle through the city beneath them.
Joe Summers and Joe Vaughan are multidisciplinary artists based in Berlin and Bristol respectively. Angel’s Share is an exploration of what we lose through the transmission of information and our compulsive reliance on analogy. Both authors are from the younger generation of artists. In terms of their artistic approaches, they are largely conceptualists, who start each of their (joint or individually authored) projects completely anew. In doing so, they enter unexplored areas: from audio-visual to absurd-theatrical approaches.
Joe Summers has been a guest of Cirkulacija 2 four times in the last six years – in each case completely different. In 2019, as an author and curator, who during a one-month residency presented his equally young English colleagues, who have extremely successfully implemented three projects:
– The Last Of England (rež. Derek Jarman) – live score / glasbena spremljava za film https://www.cirkulacija2.org/?p=5694
– Sukitoa O Namau & Joe Summers live / zvočno teatrski performans https://www.cirkulacija2.org/?p=5733
– Tristo tisoč duš na ljubljanskem gradu / performens za radijski oddajnik in bicikelj na ljubljanskem Gradu. https://www.cirkulacija2.org/?p=5673
Production = co-organization: Cirkulacija 2 and Inštitut ON Rizom
Support: Radio Študent Ljubljana
Co-financing: Municipality of Ljubljana and Ministry of Culture RS
