felt / contact microphones / multisensorial and embodied performance as a composition of body-material- agency- space 

by Liisi Soroush

“I move in space while conducting audio with my body and felt. That defines how I idle in an environment. Felt creates a temple to hide and my body sounds and vibration in collaboration with the felt dictate how I roam around the environment. The electricity that is coming out wires connect me to the bigger networks. My body vibration together with electricity integrated me to the building and urban city scape.”

“Felt properties consists of qualities that I learned intuitively by working on it, later revealed that it is used for such;
Felt is an excellent sound insulator.

Felt has superb vibration damping qualities.

Felt has superior thermal insulating properties “

- Liisi

HUMAN- MATERIAL- INTERACTION
MATERIAL: Felt
TECH: Contactmics
           + bass pump


Audio technology consultant:

Camilo Sanchéz



- HUMAN-MATERIAL INTERACTION -

LECTURES BILGE AKTAS AND CAMILLA GROTH


- > from multiple disciplines with the general discussion and notion of human-material interaction both theoretically and concretely through material manipulation.
The topic of materiality will thus be approached from a theoretical, embodied, shared and societal point of view.

Meeting the current discussions on the topic of materiality and covers tactile experiences, embodied cognition, human-material interaction, theory on New Materiality, material agency and non-representational theories. 
At this process learning outcomes as well as concretise their learning through hands on material ideation and experimentation. 
The core was to ideate and materialize an artefact while reflecting over town artistic process and share its stages

iFELT

Performance / Composition / Contact microphone / Body-Material movement


-I felt as an independent actant was leading its ́ way.
And my mind and body followed. . 
-- attending the process with my whole body, finalising using my finger tips the processes led by the characteristics of the material; such as texture, patterns and colour. The physical interaction with the material happened in dialogue with its properties, material agencies and affordances,- furthermore, giving shelter also meanwhile process of making of resemblitation of transcendental meditation.

• - like a spider weaving its net - 

The characteristic of the felt performed in chronological order mastered by different senses:
1. Olfaction, which denotates its origins: an animal
2. Somatosensation and thermoception: The texture simultaneously being airy and light, including its nature of being rough, coarse and fluffy, therefore providing a great protection by serving as insulation material for heat (instant experience) and sound (through curious exploration turning into perception).
3. Physical form: The outcome of the design executed in material-related interaction enfolding into the conceptual aspect of it. These in relation to the time and space, the surrounding environment and quest-in-demand aiming to obtain a place of intimacy.
The colour and shape were simultaneously an argument and countermovement against the surrounding architects(including the aesthetics of it)and the service design solutions of it.

Meanwhile was to be immersed inside the material design, iFelt offered through learning-curve to meet a  realization, which was led further in a transformation from material and design into a format of a performance.


While most of the mics work through air fluctuation, the contact mics react to surfaces, and the vibrations of the material. These mics are used here as tools enabling the multisensorial and embodied performance to evolve.

The connection between the body, the creation of the felt material and the space occurred while human- body movements were creating vibrations transformed into sound while moving around the space.

The contact mics with the amplifier sonified the manifesto based on the need originated from the lack of privacy, while the real-time composition dictated the physical movement and the direction of the performance in space. 

Aesthetics / Design / Form / Holistic Structure & Shape

Aesthetics in arts has been examined since 18th century in Europe by philosophers among art and design fields. But instead certain rational properties it should be experienced through feeling, intuition and emotion.

The legacy of the iconic Finnish designers has put a heavy weight on future designers’s shoulders by focusing on formalism, minimalism and functionality. Aalto-like-minded traditions are embedded into our physical everyday environment intertwined with our psycho-sociological mindscape, choices of aesthetics, -and ways to perceive our surroundings.


The history of the Aalto university campus is acknowledged for its original purpose of serving as an educational institution for disciplines of engineering and architecture.

During the iFELT performance this feltdesign-piece is tapped and connected to the building by its electronic cables from the audio devices. The felt as itself mimicking the material of glass wool used as thermal insulation at construction and building sites. Therefore, the body-material-presentation, while conducting also body heat, integrates the performer and the material design to the building of Väre, stating that iFelt with the performer and its body was to be a part of the infrastructure of the Väre campus.

Väre can be considered as a representation and tributing the now-trending genres of architecture aiming for effective space, flexible space ideologies. Both embedded and immersed with whiteness: walls, ceilings, together with “ art as decor”,-  art pieces and installations integrated to interior design in order to celebrate its chosen appearance.

Consequently, these both hygienic and safe spatial and interior solutions disallow evolving of any identity or characteristics to emerge due to neoliberalist real-estate power-structures ruling over our cultural field and industries. This has provoked this iFelt color choices to certain direction.

The constant need for own space and privacy escalates, especially meanwhile intimate and intimidating processes such as creative work usually demands and while experiencing vulnerable moments, students are exposed to roaming delegations and peak-viewers of all kind. The people flow of unidentified and passing by clients profitable for the landloard and the owner of the space. The atmosphere of anxiety is intensified  by dimensions and measurements of the architecture (non-human-scale).

The hard surfaces and material realm, high walls and lobbies embrace echoes of any kind,- in an alienating manner. Mixed audioscapes claiming the territory, - unasked. 


The characteristics of building inspired the holistic design and outcome on this performative installation closely resembling a burka.

The questions regarding the aspects of a cultural context in proximity standards remain open, in addition this  provocative and political form of a controversial garment within iFelt project might also be observation on a discourse of “beauty” as an aesthetic experience through intuition and emotion towards a feeling.

The dissonance between these perceived explorations aroused stimulation and curiousness to continue with the explorations and research among human-material interaction.




“Accordingly, political theorist Jane Bennett calls for a deeper understanding and recognition of the linkage between nature, ethics and affect. Through the concept of vital materiality, she refers to a force that cannot be separated from matter. A craftsperson, or anyone else intimate with things, senses a force which is manifested as a propensity or tendency trapped in the matter (Bennett, 2010, p. 56). This force has an impact for the creator, and the direction in which it takes her depends on the other forces, emotions and bodies that are present in the process. As a consequence of this, the craftsperson develops a deep understanding of the ‘vitality’ of a specific material, and this leads to a productive ‘collaboration’ with it (Bennett, 2010, p. 60; see also Mäkelä & Löytönen, 2015, pp. 179-180). “







ENERGY AND ELECTRICITY AS A CONNECTING FORM ....
energy is cosmos entangeld , embodied , explosive - filled with galaxies -

network to knowledge
shifting the agency of networks of the knowledge

instrumentalize the transition

temporal level

force coming
science does not amphormize - 

( we could look ourselves our bodies—we can learn how to monitor, constant self-monitoring culture, nonstop data collecting -self-centerness including anxiety intertwined within the existential crisis of the current times...
 we have to pay attention - maybe the easiest way is to turn into ourselves - awereness through self-help and various forms of new age spiritualism masking the mission impossiple regarding the challenges such as climate change...) 
We have seen that it is hardly possible to call electricity a force, and yet we are forbidden to call it matter under the penalty of being called unscientific![5]
It is not in the least unscientific to speak of the substantiality of the so-called Forces. Subject to some future specific name, this force is substance of some kind, and can be nothing else.[6]
[But] the Occult Sciences do not regard either electricity or any of the forces . . . as matter in any of the states known to physical Science; to put it more clearly, none of these ‘forces,’ so-called, are either solids, gases, or fluids.[7]
It was only at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th that science discovered that phenomena such as light, heat, chemical affinity, electricity, and so on, were mediated by subatomic particles such as electrons, photons, etc.
Source
Mme. Blavatsky maintained that there are no blind and mechanical forces in the cosmos. Everything is an expression of some kind of intelligence. Even electricity is a manifestation of the elementals:
We will go further than that, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance but that it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world according to the eternal Law of KARMA.[8]
Electricity, Magnetism, Sound, Light, Heat, Cohesion, etc. Occult Science defines all these as Super-sensuous effects in their hidden behaviour, and as objective phenomena in the world of senses; the former requiring abnormal faculties to perceive them—the latter, our ordinary physical senses. They all pertain to, and are the emanations of, still more supersensuous spiritual qualities, not personated by, but belonging to, real and conscious CAUSES. To attempt a description of such ENTITIES would be worse than useless. . . . Men of science may term them Force or Forces generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism sees in the effects “Elemental” (forces), and, in the direct causes producing them, intelligent DIVINE Workmen. The intimate connection of those Elementals (guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers)—their correlation we might call it—with the elements of pure Matter, results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc.[9]


https://theosophy.wiki/en/Electricity




CONCEPTUAL: more to come 
AFFORDANCES : more to come