February 26. Lyrical Gravity with Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein in conversation with Benjamin Busch

Online – Friday, February 26, 19:00
Lyrical Gravity with Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein in conversation with Benjamin Busch
Use this link to join: https://icn-artem.zoom.us/j/83239626025?pwd=emY3alNFb1JvcmtINmN3dU8zNHpvUT09

LYRICAL GRAVITY is a multiplayer VR artwork for seven spectators that approaches Virtual Reality as a happening. By speculating on a fictional kind of gravity, it makes use of pop songs and their lyrics as psychoacoustic gates for triggering embodied memories and dormant affects, while leading the users on a sensorial somatic experience into the realm of instinct, intuition and desire.

Matteo Marziano Graziano and Zoe Goldstein—in conversation with Benjamin Busch—will discuss the aesthetics and intentions of the project, while simultaneously streaming sections of the VR environments. They will additionally address the analog energo-somatic methodology used to design the digital spaces of LYRICAL GRAVITY, working at the intersection between psychosomatic consciousness studies and practices utilising ‘systemic constellations’.

LYRICAL GRAVITY makes use of a contemporary western music dramaturgy to retrace the fundamental relational forces that move us as a collectivity as we strive for shared empowerment and political self-determination. Pop hits allow access to deeper affective states—joy, fear, surprise, disgust, anger, arousal, excitement, tranquility—redeeming affections, playfulness, touch and solidarities in the collective dreaming of post-pandemic sustainable scenarios. This return to collective affect opens up a performative field in which negotiations between body states, emotional scripts and cognitive processes arise from the embodiment of language through song inside of the VR space.

LYRICAL GRAVITY is a project with and by Matteo Marziano Graziano, Linards Kulless, Zoe Goldstein, Yuri Shimaoka, Matias Brunacci, Polina Zinziver, Michael Tane, Sabine Huschka, Jacqueline Wong, Samuel Hertz. Presented by TIER – The Institute for Endotic Research in collaboration with fabricated.life and gamelab.berlin – Humboldt University. It is funded by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. It is supported by the European Union under the House of Europe program.

Matteo Marziano Graziano is a transdisciplinary artist, whose body-based practice is rooted within contemporary performance and bridges to visual arts, video arts, digital spaces, and music theatre. Their practice deals with questions of embodiment in relation to consciousness, the shaping of social relationships, and affects. This leads to moving image making processes and explores the notion of subjectivity within spectatorship. Their artistic research is informed by bioenergetics, quantum physics, system theory, and deep ecology. Matteo is associate choreographer at BTT Balletto Teatro di Torino. Their work has been present a.o. at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, Schaubühne Berlin, Uferstudios Berlin, Stockhausen Foundation for Music, KOW Gallery.

Zoe Goldstein is a dancer and performer, with a background in medical anthropology. As a dance maker, her practice draws from Butoh, Body Weather, contemporary dance and improvisation. She works both independently and with the GᾹZ Collective with Noga Abramovitch and Helen Burghardt. As a performer, she has collaborated with diverse dance, theatre and visual artists, including Josh Rutter, Sherwood Chen, SIGNA, Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, Yuko Kaseki, Egle Budvytyte, and Matteo Marziano Graziano.

Benjamin Busch is an American visual artist and architect living in Berlin. Spanning art, architecture, curating, and writing, his work deals with the aesthetics/politics of space. His ongoing research considers spatial practice through processes of urbanization, self-organization, and the everyday, with regard to the growing role of computation across societies. He has co-directed The Institute for Endotic Research since 2018.