Lianne van Roekel

One year ago, I was confronted with a material I had never seen and smelled before. The gorgeous brownish translucency of the material, the undefinable smell, the asymmetrical texture and patterns, the incredible strength yet flexibility it had, provoked strong ambivalent sensibilities. Since this cross-modal encounter, the mighty material of cellulose grown by microorganisms has been the focus of the research for my Master degree of the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Academy of Arts/ Royal Conservatory of the Hague (2020).  The sentence ‘What does it mean to give agency to the material, to follow the material and to act with the material?’ (Petra Lange-Berndt) has been the main inspiration for the construction of the (material) research methodology that followed. I created an experimental domestic (sound) set-up (see photos) in which I followed the growth of 16 sheets of cellulose in five consecutive iterations over a period of six months (December 2019 - May 2020) in a literal (=time) and figurative (=meaning) manner. Simultaneously to this growing process, I write, think, act, feel in the same spatial context. The result after the 5 repetitions, a total amount of 80 sheets, are 'The Pages of my Research'. The entire work consists of a (1) written work (thesis) (2) textile installation of 3 meters high with the 80 translucent sheets (photo) and (3) the experimental installation through which the (live) recordings of the fermentation are audible for the public (photo). In this manner, I hope to provoke a similar ‘multi sensorial’ experience to visitors.

The site specific work Strings & Needles has been developed, together with Birgit van der Knaap, during the last three days of the 10-day artist residency / field recording workshop Audiotalaia in the North of Spain. The concept is extremely simple; we found an agricultural farm fence and used it as a grid to create a zillion strings with different frequencies. By means of a dozen of needles that were hanging in the tree, the community that visited the final concert at the church of Santa Susanna could play together. It had become a communal instrument/harp. The sound was amplified through the placement of 2 contact mics on different places on the fence. The speaker was hidden in the tree. ​

The Boundary of Things contains a haptic interface that mediates light and sound. By interconnecting vision, hearing and touch, our visual world in which touch plays an inferior role is temporarily moved aside. It's an interplay among the senses in which the animate and inanimate, the static and the everlasting changing world, and the organic and inorganic are senses and questioned. The artwork therefore becomes an instrument with which to playfully search for boundaries and balance. The visitor is invited to touch with hesitation and to hesitate through touch. This installation was selected for the Uncut Rietveld "Hold me now: feel and touch in an unreal world" at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I further developed this (sound) project for my graduation of July 2018. See the video APP(E)AL(L)ING for the results.

"...Thought itself in dramatic encounters with imperceptible forces: moments when intensities provoke the mind to interpret and create." (Ramley, Deleuze and education, p. 178) ​ This sentence was the starting point of the, (practical) research between the logical versus the illogical, reason versus emotion, the conscious mind versus the subconscious one versus the unconscious version, the known versus the unknown, the unnamable and namable. In practical form, my aim was to make an installation, or machine rather, that plays with the effects (and illusions) of our perception and deals with the different ways of conscious and not so conscious operations of our mind. In order to do so, I have used neural oscillation, the so-called brain waves categories, as point of departure for the visual (re)presentation; ​ delta; unconscious, intuition and insight (upper) theta; sleep and dream alpha, meditation beta; activity and conversation gamma; learning and knowledge (lowest) ​ By the means of the subjective and purely visual imagination of these 5 categories and the visual elements I have used, can I provoke and trigger with the "participant" these actual differences, doubt and confusion?

The starting point of this installation was the curiosity towards the (old) concept of the uncanny of the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch (1906): ​ Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. The mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another kind of feeling ​ Freud has appropriated this concept. In short, the uncanny according to him is when the familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar and when this unfamiliarity touches the core of ourselves. To say it in a Freudian way: when the repressed makes itself unconsciously known. Playing around with the border between the familiar/unfamiliar dichtomy has become one of my main interest, yet very challenging, after this project. This process of making this installation has also been the trigger for the development of my (then premature, looking back now, but maybe still underdeveloped) ideas and research towards what interactivity subjectively means in an artistic context and more specifically to my interest; the interconnection between touch and hesitation. Wanting to interact (touch), but not wanting to interact (touch) at the same time. Can I accomplish this by the means of literal human forms (inspired by the Uncanny Valley) and (dead) human material, such as hair? Provoking confusion and doubt, by the development of "weird" machines that contain human forms and material, yet that do not have a familiar form. The creation of the Hairball Machine is a good example of this thinking, taken into consideration that hair is both disgusting as well as very fluffy and therefore attractive to touch**.

Multimedia installation with real crickets and one solar cricket. The real-time real sounds of the crickets was used as the basic sound of this installation. However, the movement of the crickets in their habitat provoked distortion, change of pitch, volume and reverb of the input sound.