Journal of the meeting September 2022

September 25 2022

September 25th, day 1. 16h20 - First discussions – Geert, Jan & Bram Amongst us there’s a feeling that we miss a hands-on layer before the wiki. Reason might bet hat the wiki is ‘public’ and thus a publishing tool. That we should not forget, though, it is a link we distribute – so we will need to provide content. As said before, we would do the evaluation of the wiki is december. But can we imagine a practical inbetween stage for the wiki? A place to keep track of what interests us and what we are working on – and maybe drafts to publish later on the wiki. Proposal to work with personal folders on the google drive – that are consultable for others. And they can consist of: References/literature Traces of discussions and/or meetings Texts we are working on that we’d like to share among us. It would generate a context where we can follow each other in thinking and thinking-processes – before we publish more open. Convinced that i twill not replace the drive but will generate for it. Geert prepared the folders on the drive

17h25 – general overview of the year at KASK/ schoolyear ’22-’23 – Geert, Jan, Emese, Bram & Minna What is our joined agenda: involvement in the 2d year performance (6 days) – Oct – Dec ’22 Geert prepared a document on the drive/recap of the meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jiLAYoET0VmAZR6r4DNLAAZXyOIrmJrQZQanHD6-T14/edit#heading=h.q9c1dg7psr5f Proposal KASK – 1st semester/12 ‘full’ Thursdays – class by Heike ‘open atelier’ Heike interested in light, as startingpoint. Conceptual questions – what do we light as: when do we give attention, awareness, presence? Performativity. Proposal Ezra: focus on four aspects - time, color, direction and intensity/ one or two of us to introduce these themes. And start working with these groups. The classes will happen in a studio without real tech possibilities, which can challenge us to work light without tech. How to proceed on this agenda: please check google doc and provide Ezra with dates that work for you. So she can make the puzzle with Heike.

Gangplank (Berlin). Proposal to see how we structure this week as an experiment and proposal to intervene in Gangplank with a similar idea of sessions, without programming full days.

Projectweek starting march 20th – first outlines: As said in the application, we will have tot hink of a way to bachelor-proof. A proposal could bet o tot his in the context of the projectweek: it has the right timing and guaranteed presence from the RL-group. Meaning that students that participated in previous projectweek, or students from the performance trajectory can pass by to ask questions on their project. We could structure the week in mornings that are programmed – like last year and us being present in the afternoon in som esort of ‘open class’ – to host one-on-one or group-questions. Initiative tob e taken by students though. Open question: do we keep an open invitation for the projectweek or do we prefer to focus on performing arts. How actively can/do we want to open up to film, plastic arts, …? Undecided but a remark from Jan: the link between the auditive and the visual is very fast made. With even some shared discourse. Can we not find an interesting tool for explanation there? Canw e not ask other departments to brainstorm on light – how they would talk on light using their discours. Which could be an interesting input for us. E.g. What does musical impressions represent in light – see also: Sloterdijk’s Sound and Light.

25 sept (11h30-13h): looking back

’Waterfall’ session to clarify what our ‘goals’ are with this research project, in which way these goals are shared or individual ‘goals’, and in which direction we want to steer this. What have we done until now? Where do we want to go?

Questions:

What is this research about? What should this research be about? What are the goals of this research?

(answers do not have to encompass the totality of the research but can focus on a specific part of it)

translated into 1 question:

What do we imagine this research project should/could achieve in 4 years?

follow-up session: How are we doing this and how do we want to redirect/change/sharpen how we are doing this?

September 26 2022

9h45/DDSKS - meeting and tour de table Naja Lee Jensen – artistic leader HAUT, Katrin von Linstow – head of communication HAUT, Bettina Rex - artistic leader HAUT ad interim, Pernille Plantener Holst - lightdesigner and coördinator lightdepartment at DSKS - and Ingunn Fjellang Saether – student BA lightdesign at DDSKKS. 10h10/DDSKS - Visit of the school with Ingunn 11h25/DDSKS – Jan, Geert, Minna, Estelle, Emese, Henri, Ingunn & Bram First session as an reflective exercise in resetting – or confirming - the goals of the project. An exercise in auto-reflection, trying to map the project. Proposed instrument by Geert: a Waterfall-question/discussion: “What do you imagine the project should have achieved the project in four years?” First round – individually and on paper, see the drive: Second round – in pairs, discuss, and on new paper. Important note: on purpose we kept some of the ‘newer’ people together to keep as much and as long as possible critique/’uncorrupted’ views into the discussion: Emese/Estelle – Jan/Henri – Bram/Geert – Minna/Ingunn

4th round: GENERAL GOALS

GROW a community of lighting designers that can SHARE tools, practices, references and vocabularies

CONTAMINATE the broader field of performing arts, its practices and the discourses that drive it.

CLAIM a position for lighting design in the form of a DYNAMIC MANIFESTO (‘Share the space’) - to envision fair practices

INCITE new research from the perspective of lighting design - published as a list of phd proposals

September 27 2022

Reflecting Light/Copenhagen Residency Report Day 2/Tuesday Sept 27th

10h17 - Hauntology intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology & Emese setting an example from how Hauntology functioned in her artistic collaboration before – where references from US lightdesign inspired her approach to the artistic content (the invisible work of the silkworms) of a project but also blocked the relation with the artistic team. & 10h41 - collective reading Mark Fisher: Why hauntology? Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ in his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. ‘To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept,’ he wrote. (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, 1994, p202) Hauntology was this concept, or puncept. The pun was on the philosophical concept of ontology, the philosophical study of what can be said to exist. Hauntology was the successor to previous concepts of Derrida’s such as the trace and differance; like those earlier terms, it referred to the way in which nothing enjoys a purely positive existence. Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does. In the famous example, any particular linguistic term gains its meaning not from its own positive qualities but from its difference from other terms. Hence Derrida’s ingenious deconstructions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘phonocentrism’, which expose the way in which particular dominant forms of thought had (incoherently) privileged the voice over writing. But hauntology explicitly brings into play the question of time in a way that had not quite been the case with the trace or differance. One of the repeated phrases in Specters of Marx is from Hamlet, ‘the time is out of joint’ and in his recent Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Hagglund argues that it is possible to see all of Derrida’s work in relation to this concept of broken time. ‘Derrida’s aim,’ Hagglund argues, ‘is to formulate a general ‘hauntology’ (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional ‘ontology’ that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet’ (Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, 2008, p82) Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is it just a figure of speech? The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing. The great thinkers of modernity, Freud as well as Marx, had discovered different modes of this spectral causality. The late capitalist world, governed by the abstractions of finance, is very clearly a world in which virtualities are effective, and perhaps the most ominous ‘spectre of Marx’ is capital itself. But as Derrida underlines in his interviews in the Ghost Dance film, psychoanalysis is also a ‘science of ghosts’, a study of how reverberant events in the psyche become revenants. Referring back to Hagglund’s distinction between the no longer and the not yet, we can provisionally distinguish two directions in hauntology. The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). The ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels had warned of in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto was just this kind of ghost: a virtuality whose threatened coming was already playing a part in undermining the present state of things. In addition to being another moment in Derrida’s own philosophical project of deconstruction, Specters of Marx was also a specific engagement with the immediate historical context provided by the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Or rather, it was an engagement with the alleged disappearance of history trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man. What would happen now that actually existing socialism had collapsed, and capitalism could assume full spectrum dominance, its claims to global dominion were thwarted not any longer by the existence of a whole other bloc, but by small islands of resistance such as Cuba and North Korea? The era of what I have called ‘capitalist realism’ - the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism - has been haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance. As Derrida wrote: There is today in the world a dominant discourse...This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism! (Specters of Marx, p64)

11h01 – digestion the reading, how does this resonates? And how do we want to work with it? What is this idea of spectre? With Fisher hauntology is a negative pessimistic view, but we could also see it as sth very positive ‘how can we learn from the past’. How do I read it: personal perspective, or more sociatal perspective? Intuitively? To lighting design? Forced to work with led-light. What is the darkness in this: how can we unveil what is connecting us and how we act today is defined by uncontious fears on the future.

11h20 – the interviews – and how to generate two axes from there. “Attempt to create a landscape that defines current theatre history and see how in relation to that lighting futurism can be implicated. My idea is that I for sure but perhaps more of us tend to internalise shortcomings of theater and its strategies, and I would like us to create a net of objectivity, as much as is feasible.” 1? What made you work in theatre? When and where did you start? 2? How would you describe th theatre you started with? What is great about it, what is difficult? 3? What did you base your artistic goals upon, what did you work towards? 4? Was there anyone whose work showed a landmark in lighting for you? 5? Can you recall a situation when your work has been particularly difficult? 6? Can you recall a situation when conditions where ideal for you? 7? How would you describe theater of today? What is great about it, what is difficult about it? 8? Is there anything I didn’t ask and is it essential to the theatre work with/nurture/propose/create.

Exercise in collective answering on question 2 – and keep space for individual interviews with the ones that didn’t do so before.

What was great/what was difficult: Dynamic/vibe/engagement vs. lack of means – and the connection between them. Cocreation – and sharing with an audience Preceding artists haunting you in a theatre.

12h09 – references

Ed. 2016: “How do theatre lighting designers decide what is 'the right light' for each moment of a production? What informs their choices? Why does the audience respond more strongly when the lighting feels 'right'? By interviewing nineteen prominent lighting designers and weaving their insights through his own narrative, Nick Moran aims to answer such questions. This book considers practice across different types of theatre, including opera, dance, musicals and drama. Rather than being a technical manual, it allows lighting designers to contribute contrasting and complementary ideas about how to approach lighting design. Moran argues that the best stage lighting is made with emotion, passion and soul, by creative artists willing to take risks.”

14h19 - The first summary/an – not so - active listening: A dynamic manifesto: from a collective writing, as a charter annex to the ‘model’-contracts. Projection of the beginning – professionalisation as a recurrent topic. But also: the ghosting of the first approaches in nowadays practices. Archeological way of designing: how building upon traditions – the gain of knowledge. Preparation of the work – prework: process-based working as nowadays way of working – fear of killing the proces.

Choosing the methods of working. Each work needs to find its own process – defined by what it is about. Taking a ‘free’ position – choosing the method to be working. Hacking a process, a now and there – and giving continuity to it.

Independance? A point of making your own circumstances – to the point of thematising and trashing ideas pending on group decisions. Consequences of collective working – how to create in solitude/loneliness. Lightdesigner as the independant figure in a creation – also read as such by the artistic team. Personal and professional.

What is the space that we take and how do we take it? Long lasting artistic relationships – as creating your own circumstances, as a strategy.

Accesibility? Making things possible – scale of the theater – time differs in the theatre: negociation to take the space.

What do we take for granted? What are the stage-rules? And what are the extremes: no presence of tech vs repertory plot as total flexibility vs rigidity? To be questionned.

Lack of understanding: how do you communicate/where are the lines drawn – and how are we made into a characters – and how do we read them ourselves?

Lighting design – as a problematic nomalisation. ‘design’ is too applied: proposing solutions – posing light as a communicator – with a ‘commercial’ hint to it. Cfr. Grouptalks day 1. – name the media. Comes to:

14h43 - discussion on authorship – finding similar positions such as graphic designers. Co-authorship in a final stage: giving it a final layer. Ref. Eva Moelaert ‘Dear Reader’/book on handwriting – design represents the content. PhD Tomi Humalisto? Inverse the roles: ask choreographers to make a performance for a lightdesign? Describe what you are doing – as in audiodescription – ref. unavailability of the theatre: off-stage working on lightdesign? Loss of communication or Can we learn from this towards vocabularies? But it implies a strange abstraction – in making it specific in words?

Ref. Factual description of light – describe what you see as an onset on preliminary lightdesign: describe what you want to do/see. And shall we keep doing it: enriching to do – as it fills a lack. Spend a day on factual describing light during Gangplank? – and exercise it before each of us. Involve 2d year of performance – shared agenda in seeing performances: Jonas Chéreau/Réverberer. And why do we do it? To gain vocabulary and viewpoints – cfr. Antropologist stand-point description and DASarts method ‘as a … I …’ Contaminate stage-critics by sharing this practice. Choosing the facts – will be interesting – do we write about the paint, the brushes, the canvas, … It’s about the phenomena – what is it that i see. Ref. Donna Harraway – on the concept of objectivity Add an awareness of the functioning of physiology.

15h42 – a start from the collegial aspect: not a singular work – but a contribution to a whole, creating meaning. The discourse not reflected/disconnected from the work – ref. the six beautifull words. Politicalisation of the theatre: the untamed theatre shifts to political (correct/positioned) theatre. Unapologetic art – vs mainstream culture. Artivists – is theatre more connected to the world/in research – not in presentation, move away from the product – in searching time to reflection. Value of research. How became luxury and an alternative view become oppositions? – Scarcity aesthetics – and squeezing lighting design in festivals – leaving two discussion – ethics and industrialisation of the tools. Theatre is forgetting its skills.

Generosity in recognising the skills of each other – at the hart of this research. But also acknowledge the expertise from other disciplines – and refer to them, accumulation of knowhow.

What do we do with this? An exercise for the fanzine: write a (full) text with the quotes? A rizomatic disours with multiple viewpoints merged into one text.

16h30 open session ‘Futuring Lighting Design’ Opposites chosen: experst vs co-creators/abundance of tools vs scarcity of tools

September 28 2022

Report Day 3/Wednesday Sept 28th 11h00 - Ethics of work: (citation: EMAIL Bruno) commodification: commodity (wikipedia) definition: interchangable, indistinguishable, regardless of who produced them. Lighting design (not light) became a commodoty, doesn’t matter who made it. Bruno call this the industrialisation of theatre. You make a performance, you need light. (case study: impulz tanz) also the lighting designer becomes a commodity. But then is the other side the autonomy of the lighting designer. QUESTIONS Minna: -did the production decide this or the festival? -You don’t make contracts? What? Geert -how does this connect to romanticism of early work? 2 AXIS (picture 1) -Lighting designer as COMMODITY vs. lighting designer as AUTONOMOUS ARTIST -interchangeability vs fluidity And one more line suggested by Ingunn (picture 2) -uniqueness vs use of tools provided locally fluidity as choice fluidity as consequence (scheme) Jan: I don’t want to make it reproducible in a purely tecnhical way, I want to make it fluid. Is it fluid for all the parameters, or is it fluid in the sense that light, sound, set… can be taken away. Hierarchical axis, based on tradition, culture (and ontology!!) Minna: ethics of the lighting designer / ethics of the venue terminology: repertory plot

Would you consider yourself an autonomous artist -Henri: questions on the word artist, don’t feel at all autonomous -Minna: autonomous for me means that I would be fully responsible, I do not feel autonomous, I am the lighting designer who feels responsible for that part, but involved in other element, where my responsiblity is not. Not everyone would describe themselves as autonomous artist. Henri wouldn’t even call himself an artist. Leads to the exercise of Minna to describe your practice.

Commodity vs autonomous artist: Minna:

Julia Reist: On the other hand, dacht ik de laatste dagen nog of misschien een workshop met de studenten rond collaborative practices and alternative production models interessant zal zijn? Ik werk momenteel een workshop / working table formaat uit op basis van de Tool: FOR WHAT IT IS WORTH, dat ik met arp heb ontwikkelt. Hier leg ik met de studenten een focus op fair practice, sustainable and safe working conditions en forms of communication en kijk naar hoe wij werken meer dan wat het "eindresultaat / product" is. Na mijn afsluiten van de Master in Antwerpen dit jaar, werd het mij nog eens duidelijk waar de grote blind spots liggen tussen het educatieve curriculum en de tools om na diploma zelf aan de slag te gaan. Ook het feit dat het HOE ook bij lessen en het verder geven van knowledge nog heel vaak niet in vraag gesteld en kritisch bekeken wordt binnen in de instellingen. zo wordt er nog steeds van een neoliberalistisch en hiërarchisch manier uit les gegeven - ook als de inhoud en de thematieken van het Curriculum naar alternatieve een meer inclusieve vormen van onderwijs en collective study vragen.

https://www.facebook.com/events/3635894643177904/?acontext=%7B%22ref%22%3A%2252%22%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22[%7B%5C%22surface%5C%22%3A%5C%22share_link%5C%22%2C%5C%22mechanism%5C%22%3A%5C%22share_link%5C%22%2C%5C%22extra_data%5C%22%3A%7B%5C%22invite_link_id%5C%22%3A335751581347651%7D%7D]%22%7D

Julia holds a master in Artistic Research and works in projects bridging research dance and performance. Since 2011, she works as a freelance researcher and art producer on a large range of (inter)national projects. In close dialogue with the artists, Julia focuses on finding other methods and forms of working with and through artistic practices, to contribute to a more sustainable, inclusive and aware artistic working field. Close collaborations include amongst other Jija Sohn (NL/JP), Rossella Biscotti (NL/IT), Luanda Casella (BE/BR), David Weber Krebs (DE/BE), Nastio Mosquito (BE/AO), Philippine Hoegen (NL/BE), Sophia Rodriguez (VZ/BE), Benjamin Kahn (FR/BE), Effi&Amir (IL/BE).

& 13h30 - How do you collaborate? How do you communicate? Just time for one question. How would you like to talk with a piece maker

September 29 2022

Report of Day 4: Biking into the Future

Henri proposes the following working plan for the day:

Individually writing a text on futurism of Lighting Design: how can you imagine Lighting Design in a near or further future Reading and discussing the texts to/with one another Finding a form and dramaturgy to present the text in sort of a performance format towards the students and the school during the open session 16:30-18:00 Post performance feedback from the students

Results of the individual writing, a text by Minna, Henri, Estelle, Inguun and Jan, can be found on the GDrive

Proposal to publish/use these texts for fanzine 3?

Proposed set up for the presentation: 1 completely dark studio space 1 bike with the back wheel lifted from the floor to be able to bike on the spot, 1 conventional dynamo applied to the back wheel of the bike, 1 front lamp attached at the front of the steering fork of the bike 1 music stand holding our paper text for reading while biking Biking in order to light the text Reading out load the text Being lit ourselves by the reflection of the light on the paper

Proposed order of the text and dramaturgy of the presentation Henri (as he is introducing the bike experiment as a starting point of his text) , Estelle, Jan, Minna, Inguun An order that is representing an evolution of drifting of in a far future and text by text coming back towards the more reality based environment proposed in the text of Inguun. As Minna is concluding her text with the idea of having evolved towards alternative ways of applying interfaces for lighting design - she dances her light - we plan an interlude of all other dancing a little together around the bike whit Inguun is starting up her biking session and lighting us in doing so.

It takes us some time to prepare the bike and implementing the dynamo that Inguun found for us on a second hand website…. But we manage to create comfortable conditions, including a total black out situation.

Only the registration of things (photo/camera/…) is planned a little last minute and turned out to be not very bulletproof I hope we will be able to load up here in this folder the picture being taken by Pernille and the film footage of the school camera The reading/showing was attended by some 15(?) students and turned out to be smooth, effective and pretty fun to do…

Post showing, the students were asked for their input and personal comments on the idea of the futurism of Lighting Design…. And we decided to keep on talking in the absence of light (the dark studio with no more biking / dynamo lighting) Henri recorded this conversation and will put this on the GDrive

Interesting thoughts came up but i had the idea that the darkness we were having this discussion in became a little bit the focal point of the discussion…. In a similar way the energy/ecology crisis we’re living these days turned put to be a focal (starting)point of our own texts on the future of LightingDesign.

Concluding the working-day with an informal gathering over a beer Concluding the day with again a good restaurant and some wine…

September 30 2022

DAY 5 Estelle Gautier Henri Emmanuel Doublier Ingunn Fjellang Sæther Jan Maertens Minna Tiikkainen

MORNING SESSION:

We started our day by eating delicious waffles made by Ingunn!

Minna Tiikkainen shared a document (about LD 2019.pdf), where she tries to describe and define her role as a lighting designer. It is meant to be given to a production management who needs to understand lighting designers work and position inside the production and the primary purpose of this document is to help negotiate her fee. The minimum fee in the document is based on the CAO Netherlands 2019 and the monthly salary system is based on Finnish association of lighting, sound and video designers.

We read this document together and after had a short discussion about our individual working methods and identity and also how we negotiate our fees and the conclusion was that we all have slightly different idea of what lighting designer working identity is. Therefore we thought that it would be interesting if everyone of us would formulate their own document trying to describe their personal working identity as a lighting designer.

PLEASE NOTE the common decision was that these documents are VERY PERSONAL should NOT be published! Not even in Fansine!!! (and therefore also about LD 2019.pdf)

These documents could help formulate and inform the project DYNAMIC MANIFESTO on lighting design.

Possible frame or index for this personal document about LD: 1. Who is a lighting designer and what is s/he doing? 2. What is the difference between the lighting designer and technician? 3. How long does it take to create a lighting design? 4. How much is the fee of freelancer (self employed) lighting designer?

AFTERNOON -We finished documenting our residency in HAUT/ The Danish National School of Performing Arts