Kay Schuttel

On Demand 2019

Strategies of empathy deployed by technology market:

Stand by 2019

State of perceived and real immobility:

Together Alone 2019

Moving images stuck in repetitive and encoded movements:

Where are you now? 2018

As mirrors distorted enough to reflect:

How are you? 2017

Upon each encounter the phrase is replayed, each time emphasising the performance of language distanced from its original meaning:

Viewpoint 2016

Control the reality:

BeeldTaal 2015

An estrangement between the sound and image:

If the wall would be the floor 2016

A room without gravity:

Moving the Frame 2016

Public become performers:

Live 7.30 2014

My point of departure was to deconstruct the principle of film by separating its three key components: audio, imagery and time. By means of live performance and real-time playback or both:

0:0 2015

Visual descriptions of physical spaces:

Déjà Vu 2013

The effect of mediatised reality:

On Demand

Live performance with six dancers and QR code for soundtrack on mobile phones

An exhibition space is fullfilled by a choreography acted by six performers, whose movements are focused on the practice of stretching and warming up their bodies. Creating the expectation of a different event that is going to happen soon, they continue this ritual dance while the audience moves freely in the area. Whereas these two groups are united in the common use of the body to move and fill the space, the commonly perceived distance between the observer and the observed is interrupted by the ask for an active participation of the audience. The activation of the soundtrack for the performance, to be done using a QR code and therefore their own mobiles, is conceived to be on charge of the audience.

On Demand (2019) bases its premises on the reflection about the methods of interaction between the performers and the public of art events. A fundamental point for the development of performance art since the beginning of this discipline, as well as in Kay Schuttel's production, this interplay is here structured to highlights slight but impactful changes in this relationship introduced by the use of digital devices during the fruition of art events. Not only devices usefull to take photographs and share information on social medias, mobile permits the use websites and apps that can offer media for the creation and realisation of artworks, showing at the same time how much the strategies of empathy deployed by technology market entered our own way of thinking the environment in which we live and think.

Text by Alessandra Franetovich

Stand by

Live Performance and site specific installation with mobile phones, tablets and laptops, 45 minutes

Composed by four parts, Stand by is a performance conceived with a time-based structure staged by six young dancers in an art gallery. Initially closed to the audience, the place hosts the performers who pretend to act as people using laptops, mobiles and tablets in daily life, but under the gaze of the public that can look through a glass vitrine. Kept outside but still present, the audience is recorded by cams to appear on the same devices, becaming subject of his same gaze.

The performance thus tends to blur and rewrite the role of the audience, and the act of reversing the point of view turn the nature of the event. A shift that finally materialize itself when the audience is allowed to enter inside the gallery, and to feel empathy with the setting of the room. Unconfortable, illuminated by the screens, deprived of furniture, the room is the visual synthetise of a feeling that is common to younger generations. Used to live in a mass society more and more built to enhance the alienation, the exploitation, the consumerism. In this frame, to share a place in a cold and dark architecture could appear a resolution, as a moment in which taking rest after having wait for long without knowing the motivation, as following an invisible fight. This state of perceived and real immobility, a real experience of a “stand by”, allow the comparaison of humankind with the tecnhological machines that we use to leave in this mode when are not more necessary to us.

Text by Alessandra Franetovich

This project is generously supported by
Mondriaan Fund

Together Alone

Four screen video installation with multiple speaker soundscape , Gallery DITS

As an oxymoron, the title reveals a reversed perspective in the dynamics between humanity and technology, that seeks to examine how much the use of devices is affecting our approach to the knowledge and the experience of the world. The figures are in fact presented in a dress-code that is casual, coeval, but at the same time aseptic, appearing deprived by their own individuality and singularity. In a time in which the relationship and the feeling of being part of a community is reached through the use of technological apparatus and the invention of a double digital identity, it seems unavoidable for humans to be gears of a mega-machine that nowadays is moved by the use and abuse of emotions. Selfie as a mirror, a call as a caress, scrolling as the will of research, this is the era in which forms of life are encapsulated inside the device. Thus the paradoxical form of feeling together while being alone in front of a screen, and the consequential appearance of a new form of love and tenderness towards the technological devices.

With the increasing loss of privacy policies in front of a global scale community, the weight of the body, as well as the space it occupies, still represents the possibility of affirming our life, or at least an occasion to dissect our gestures and movements. To see ourselves framed from the outside. Therefore, the performative approach of the work, that is at the core of Kay Schuttel's poetics, is here represented as a ritual minimal dance defined by the daily gestures that accompany our use of mobile phone. The performers are yet transfigured into moving images stuck in repetitive and encoded movements that the machine itself requires. Reversing the perspective is intended as revelatory act, and the video projection of these solitary dances is frozen into different fragments. As isles, close but detached from each other.

Text by Alessandra Franetovich

This project is generously supported by
Mondriaan Fund

Where are you now?

Site-specific performance, 120 min.

Acted by a group of young performers, Where are you now? revolves around the paradox of mirroring human private attitudes towards digital devices, but acted in public environments. With their eyes staring on digital screens while surrounded by the pervasive sounds generated by the activity of scrolling, the performers look immersed in their own private and imaginary space. Likely to be confused with the audience, they repeat the same movements participating to a wider choreography, that aims to catch the common habit of alienating from the crowd using mobiles. As mirrors distorted enough to reflect the customs deconstructing the mechanisms behind them, the performers push the audience in the encounter with himself and his own social behaviour.

As the title reveals, spatial and temporal dimensions are asked to solve the enigma about the existence of humankind, but the question remains without any reply. At the end the empathy and self-identification with the observed expresses the sense of vulnerability of human soul drown in his own solitude. The question addressed to the pronoun “you” losts its apparent specifity when the subject fades away in the undefined state of the word. Valid both for the singular than the plural form in the blurring English language, “you” becomes a generic “other”, and, for extension, could include the entire humankind. The inquiry to this state of indeterminacy lays at the core of this performative work, offering a reflection on social relationships in the Digital age.

Text by Alessandra Franetovich

How are you?

Site-specific performance (choreography and text) and video, 60 min.

A choreography in which five performers walk in loops, greeting each other with the rhetorical question: ‘how are you?’ Referring to a film scene in the streets of American suburbia, the sequence is repeatedly enacted and literally rewound in real-time: the performers retracing their steps, walking backwards, to then start again from the top. Upon each encounter the phrase is replayed, each time emphasising the performance of language distanced from its original meaning.

Intrigued by the social codes and unwritten rules embedded in everyday exchanges, this intervention explores the performance of these three words on encountering someone in the street. The scene becomes a mirror reflecting the looped rounds of daily movements and the intentionally unasked and unanswered phrase: ‘how are you?’

Artist-in-Residence: Vermont Studio Center, Vermont, USA.

Viewpoint

Video- and photography installation, 3 hours video loop and 25 photographs.

A work consisting of a three hours video loop, observing tourists capturing the view of the Holy Mountain of Montserrat, accompanied by a series of 25 near-identical photographs of the tourists’ screens displaying their snapshots of the Holy Mountain.
The photographs show the perspective of the tourists, the video turns the perspective towards them: the tourists become the subject in the frame.
At this heavily visited viewpoint, I was captivated by the echoed repetition in tourists’ behaviour and bodily movements. Returning there daily, I was struck by how everyone took exactly the same photograph.
Besides the self-made snapshot acting as evidence for having been somewhere, framing the image (as seen through a device) also offers the possibility to filter and ostensibly ‘control’ reality. The influence of this new way of perceiving has a huge impact on the behaviour and movements of tourists in public spaces. In this video it becomes apparent how these capturing devices direct the movements.

Artist-in-Residence: Can Serrat, Barcelona

BeeldTaal

Five-channel video installation with headphones, 09.30 min, In collaboration with Susan van Hengstum

A five-channel video installation echoing a live AVRO Radio 4 interview with Van Hengstum and myself. Radio coverage with the aim to describe our artistic process for this visual artwork in words is mirrored by our visual description of the radio interview by means of a camera filming us from outside – looking in through the window of the Torenkamer (Tower room).

Radio 4’s incentive to facilitate the production of an artwork and discuss this as a part of their live programme would seem to come from a need to follow and gain insight into artistic processes. Yet paradoxically, through the medium of radio, the process can only be expressed in words while the subject is visual art. From this role as ‘their subject’, by turning our gaze back onto the radio makers, making a visual recording of this radio slot as a key part of our ‘artistic process’, this tension becomes magnified.

For the final video installation, the original audio of the radio programme is (re)combined with the visual material from the video camera. Through the combination of interior and exterior footage, an estrangement between the sound and image comes about; though they had originally belonged together they could never be perceived in this particular way. The work was installed in the former Film Museum in Vondelpark, where the original recording had also taken place. Through this mirroring of descriptions throughout its process, production and installation, the work brings a form of mise en abyme into effect.

Torenkamer Vondel CS ism Radio 4, AVRO/TROS

If the wall would be the floor

Performative audio tour, map and headphones, 08.00 min

A site-specific audio tour using the exhibition space as an installation to explore the perceptual experience of a room without gravity: allowing the imagination to work against the force of gravity within the space. Based on video material of astronauts in outer space, I explored rotational body movements that give rise to a sense of disorientation and weightlessness. The audio guide encourages the viewer to un-imagine left and right, up and down; just as in outer space, everything is brought into a slow, continual rotation: the wall could be the floor, the ceiling the wall and the floor the ceiling.

Using their body to steer their imagination, guided by the audio offering instructions for various physical and perceptual exercises, the viewer is co-creator of a new perspective of space: space without gravity. In turn, audience members become performers, transforming the space into a stage as they enact this gravitational shift in perception: sensing a new lightness in the release and turn of a limb, the slow flex of the spine, rotation of the head, taking a seat on the wall – or rather the floor. The accompanying map shows the walls to be the floor, further ‘unseating’ the audience with the illusion of walking on walls.

Group exhibition with the theme <Gravity: Eve’s, Isaac’s and Mine>

Moving the Frame

Live performance with audio tour, 07.00 min

A site-specific audio tour for the Vrijthof Plein in Maastricht. Members of public were given headphones through which they could hear detailed descriptions of bodily movements and postures that they were in turn invited to adopt. The headphones were also a visual reference to audio guides for tourists. The descriptions are based on my observations of postures and movements of people taking photographs in public spaces. As the audience follow the instructions on Vrijthof Plein an interesting convergence of actors comes about, those who are actually taking photographs and participants of the work who are concentratedly assuming the prescribed posture. The key difference being that the participants aren’t holding an actual camera.

The members of public become performers and their various postures form a choreography. However the performer is unaware of the particular action they are mimicking. Through the pace and detail of the description the poses become abstracted and the participant is unable to recognize the seemingly unconscious postures the body adopts when capturing a photograph or video. The apparatus directs the body and frames the view in such a way that these actions become unconscious. While we are taking a photograph, what is visible within the frame has our full concentration – not the posture our body assumes in order to see what we want to capture.

Artist-in-Residence: The Drive of Walking, Van Eyck, Maastricht

Live 7.30

Video- and sound installation with live performance, 07.30 min

An installation comprising an iPad placed against the window, framing a real-time ‘screening’ of what was taking place outside the window, three headphones playing the sound from the microphone I carried with me, and a digital timer. During a performance of 7:30 minutes I traced the space, entering and leaving the screen’s frame, while carrying a microphone to playback the sound of my footsteps over the headphones. As the live ‘recordings’ of sound and image become synchronised within the frame, the abstracted components come together instantaneously transforming my movement through the frame into film.

My point of departure was to deconstruct the principle of film by separating its three key components: audio, imagery and time. By means of live performance and real-time playback both in sound and on screen, I bring these key components back into relation with one another in a form that questions the principles of three-dimensional and two-dimension reality and representation. In this work I literally and figuratively trace the edges of the frame in the eyes and ears of the viewer, with the aim to heighten the audience’s awareness of mediated constructions and their effects on our perception.

Artist-in-Residence: DordtYart, Dordrecht

0:0

1:1 Symposium, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. An audio track describing physical spaces, composed for the 1:1 Symposium about 1:1 scale models. In collaboration with Susan van Hengstum

With the principle of a 1:1 representation as our point of departure, we set out to create a work in which its representation takes place in the viewers’ imagination – without the existence of a physical equivalent. The participants of the symposium each received an MP3 player with headphones. The audio track consisted of ten literary passages giving visual descriptions of physical spaces. Based on these descriptions images are formed in the mind’s eye: a 0:0 scale model. This work is a research into the effects of audio in relation to imagery.

Déjà Vu

Two-channel video installation with headphones, 08.00 min.

Two-channel video installation simultaneously screening ‘real-life’ conversations performed for the camera and reenactments of the same conversation between college students.

In various College Towns in Upstate New York, I asked students if I could capture their ‘real-life’ conversations on camera. After this initial (ostensibly authentic) take, I asked them to repeat their conversation in exactly the same fashion. What was striking in this process was the students’ effortless ability to perform this ‘documentary’ scene and then spontaneously repeat their conversations with uncanny likeness. Instinctively acting ‘natural’, ignoring the camera’s presence: understanding the principles of documentary or reality television was simply a given. By showing take 1 and take 2 simultaneously, I question the authenticity of their conversation in front of the camera, and consider the effect of mediatised reality and reality television. Have this generation become actors within their own lives?

Artist-in-Residence, Troy, New York. Screening Free Cinema at W139, Amsterdam.

News

Performance 'Where are you now"

Live performance, sound and video installation, Gallery DITS

Video installation and live performance, February 21st till March 8th 2019

Artist in Residence March and April 2019

Upcoming show in Homesession, April 4th, 2019

Performance 'Where are you now", May 1st till May 5th

Artist in Residence, July and August 2018