Sound artist: Jaakko Autio / Generative video projections: Jaakko Autio / Light design: Werne Tanskanen / Nomad Vocals Choir leader: Jussi Mattila / Nomad Vocals singers: Lotta Kokkonen, Vilma Kivimäki, Reetta Karhunen, Matleena Vuori, Linda Pennström, Anna Voutilainen, Riku Miettunen, Kasper Korhonen, Jaakko Örmälä, Sakari Bondfolk, Lasse Kettunen and Eero Lahtinen / Photography: Hilla Väyrynen / Work supported by: Outokumpu’s Old Mine Residence / Thank you: Werne Tanskanen, Pia Paananen ♡
Interpersonal Space
ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2022
Interpersonal Space at 17.00 – 23.00
Interpersonal Space is an immersive sound installation that invites visitors to linger on interpersonal space between us. In the sound installation, the visitor gets to listen to a virtual choir, 16 speakers each with their own singer’s voice. The work has no time duration, the work opens from the moment the visitor enters the space. You can rest by the work. The work has been produced in collaboration with the Nomad Vocals Choir.
The work is at demo stage in a series of works to be published in the autumn 2022. The visit is Autio´s second at Old Mine residence.
Im spending the core winter in Old Mine Residency (jan – feb 2022), in North-Karelia by myself and various other artists. Im going thru the plans for next year, i have drawn a huge schedule on the wall but I’m also working on tiny details, polishing meanings of some specific words line “contemplation” or “nonsensous”. Im enjoying and using this time and space the best way i know how. The residency is offered freely by Outokumpu city and Taike, so I’m grateful for that.
Currently i am making a research on the writings of Lucy Blackmann, an autistic author who describes her experience of reality and social interaction through writing. Blackman makes a distinction between the neurodiverse and the neurotypicals. She describes her bodily experience of being in the world as something not solid, where it is difficult to determine where the body ends and the world begins.
“Remember that my body and its“ Orbit ”include my thoughts, my real emotions, and what I call my“ feelings. ” These are not the same as what you people, i.e. neurotypicals, call “feelings” but are my carrying … vibrations, flashes, visual-blocks, touch-horrors, smell-tickles and the cross-over that comes from them. ” -Lucy Blackman, Carrying Autism.
Lucy Blackman (born 1972) is the first autistic non-verbal person in Australia to become an officially published writer with her book Lucy’s Story published in 2001, written with the help of facilitated communication. Writing serves as a way for him to articulate and connect with neurotypicals. In her text, she describes her experience of the world as continuous flux, where the experiences are not fragmented into a time with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
“I think that now people see themselves as moving between the things and the space on each side of them, so that the area in front comes up and parts before their faces, because that is how the television camera shows “reality.” Somehow I use space differently. My space envelopes me as if I were in a cocoon, and the items and other aspects of my environment enter and leave that cocoon.”.
She describes the incentive she faces to act like a neurotypical, to act independently, and to want goals that come from the realm of neurotypicals. In doing so, she becomes visible for others, but yet she raises her own way of perceiving reality as the primary experience, which works as a invisible base of the neurotypicals’ experience of reality. The capacity to directly perceive experience in-forming, what she calls autistic perception, involves a continuous carrying, a moving-with of experience in the making.
Lucy Blackmann’s text on the inner perception of autism reminds me a lot of the aesthetic experience of art. The word aesthetic means a sensory-experienced, immediate experience of being here in which the relation between the subject and the object is so intimate, safe and sound that there is no room for separate self. The aesthetic experience may happen in interpersonal space, or in interaction with other physical or mental objects. What’s so special about the aesthetic experience is the continuative quality of energy circulation between me and you, or me and it. I become absorbed into the object of my consciousness so that I gain access to the nature of things within. Because this absorption is rather inner than an outer phenomena, you can’t make an art-piece that reproduces aesthetic experience by a snap of your fingers. The aesthetic experience is a subtle and beautiful potential embedded in all humans, but it takes a little while to get aligned into it. It’s like the rose in “the Little Prince ” novel, it rather chooses itself when it’s her time to bloom.
The research of Lucy Blackmann´s writings is a part of a comission by Titanik -gallery, a forthcoming sound installation “Where You Are” at Kogo -Gallery in Tartu, Estonia. Opening in fall 2022.
More about Lucy Blackman here:
Jaakko Autio - Sound Artist 