Ghosts in the Machine: A Virtual Choral Performance as Hauntological Praxis During the COVID-19 Pandemic

An interwoven reading of the issues surrounding a performance – rehearsed and recorded remotely and hosted virtually – of Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol’s The Gauntlet: Far Away, Together, for 15 voices and electronics (given at New York University Abu Dhabi in March 2021, in which I was choral director), and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993/2006). I examine the impact that COVID-19 had on realising this performance – which had originally been intended for a ‘live’ and fully immersive and interactive presentation – and consider how earlier models of hauntological praxis in works by Karlheinz Stockhausen have parallels with performing during the pandemic. I explore the ways in which working in isolation, with little sense of time or location, foster a sense of ‘aporia’ or perplexity, overturning the binary opposition of time and space, and how the use of the SPAT immersive audio mixing tool to electronically process single voices into multiple, spatially realised echoes (ghosts) of themselves, truly gives us ‘ghosts’ in the machine.

Unstoppable Decay and Relentless Hope: Study of Alterity in Popular Culture

Consequences of capitalism’s crises and their manifestations in arts have deeply modified the way we can approach mental health. As Mark Fisher pointed out in 2009 with his book Capitalist Realism, neoliberalism is using mental illness as a way to keep existing. The capacity to think a way out of alienation is deeply linked with arts and popular culture. The article proposes to study the uncanny dialogue between arts and politics in relationships to people, and mental health. The theoretical framework will show how arts are trying to build a way out of alienation, since 2009. The article will illustrate this research with the study of many artistic practices, including our own. The findings will show how the ambiguous and uncanny relationships with the world is used by artists as a way out of alienation, despite the difficulties occurring with mental health in time of crisis.

Give: Transatlantic Collaboration Through Conversation

Artistic collaborators Kate Ledger (pianist) and Ray Evanoff (composer) discuss their working process in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversation provides the model and impetus for this process, an ongoing responsive exchange in which their individual artistic identi­ties co-evolve into forms neither could individually envision, in global cir­cumstances that have acutely disrupted the normal mechanisms providing such social interaction. Artistic values, musical specifics, metaphorical frameworks, and larger references are examined, as well as the role these various elements serve in their art’s realization and evolution. Their mod­el is an adaptive, personalized framework for making art responding to an environment where the conventional explanations for doing so have been undermined.

Metamodernism and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

Metamodernism is understood as the dominant cultural logic of the 21st century. Metamodernism’s breadth and complexity, as well as its theory’s advocacy for contemporaneity, invite for consideration whether the notion could address the most recent global events and the crises after 2020. Therefore, this study designates and explains the five key concepts of metamodernism – metaxy, abstraction, reconstruction, historicity, and a structure of feeling – and uses them to discuss the current state of affairs, the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. The study evaluates the interpretative and discursive potentials of metamodernism, finding that the crisis we now live in can be well-conceptualized from the metamodern perspective, yet at the same time the enormous impact of the crisis brings the usual metamodern perspectives into question and puts the key concepts to test.

Image–Music–Text: Operatic Experiments in the Age of the Audiovisual Essay

Emerging as a new tool and form of criticism and theorizing, the audiovisual essay has stirred many different opinions within the academy, with its many different outcomes. For scholarly purposes, combining it with text, reflection and commentary seems to be the most common and most accepted form of audiovisual essay, easily found all over the internet in well-known video archives such as YouTube and Vimeo. Towards a more poetic end of the spectrum, breaking both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of any work may deepen and reveal new possibilities, often resulting in the creation of new hybrid pieces. This paper aims to demystify these new for­mats and concepts, focusing on its potentiality as a tool for criticism and its creative possibilities regarding music and, more specifically, opera.

Instagram and artistic platforms as revenue streams for artists in Serbia

Digitalization and development of a digital marketing strategy as a way to attract the (particularly young) audience is a prerequisite for modern artists. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized this need even more, but even without pandemics, it is very hard for an artist to reach its public and to present its work to a wider range of audiences without utilizing digital tools. In this article, the author will present some possibilities available for artists to improve their visibility and promote their work in a new global digital art market. The importance of understanding the digital world, the audience’s preferences, and digital marketing are crucial for modern artists. The aim of this paper is to analyze the importance of the digital art market for artists in Serbia. The research was conducted using a questionnaire survey focused on 88 artists actively creating and participating in the art world, mostly from Belgrade, Serbia. After a contextualization of data, it is evident that the majority of artists from fail to generate income in the digital art market.

Freedom as Virus: A Critique of the Neoliberal Notion of Freedom and an Analysis of its Cultural Consequences

The extent to which the COVID pandemic has been shaped by communication is enigmatic as the very term “viral” has become a term of information science as much as of biology. Insofar as sizable populations have become cynical about information regarding COVID, their behavior has accelerated the threat of the virus. This paper proposes that this pandemic is fundamentally a crisis of communication emerging from antagonisms and inconsistencies latent within a general concept of “freedom”. The notion of freedom that has emerged with neoliberalism is one of a lack of regulation. Such a naive idea of freedom becomes particularly problematic when compounded with the classical liberal value of freedom of speech. This paper addresses the impossibility of unlimited speech, particularly on the internet, focusing on the desire such impossibility stimulates. This desire is an economic fuel for social media platforms. Insofar as artists share their practices via social media and generally use these platforms for networking, their practices inherit contradictions that artists must become conscious of to prevent a web-based practice from becoming emotionally exploitive and economically complicit. This crisis amplifies those contradictions that drive the artist to the point of despair.

(Dis-)Embodied Voices and Digital Liveness: Music Theatre in Lockdown

20 Shots of Opera, released in December 2020, is a series of twenty short pieces of music theatre between five and eight minutes long. They were created and produced in just a few months. What makes the pieces special is that they were conceived to be produced under pandemic conditions and with purely an online reception in mind. This has affected details of the recording process as well as directorial concepts such as the use of animation or superimposition of pictures. This article will analyze how selected Shots engage with these conditions, look at different types of how the voices are used and assess the specific aesthetic circumstances of digital reception, as well as discussing other specific challenges and opportunities of creating music theatre in times of Covid-19.

Vanitas Reloaded: a Remote Tableau Composition from the Corona "Home Wunderkammer"

Visuals – images – are a globally understandable exchange and copyable transmission of information. “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space,” Hamlet noticed. We also use our Coronavirus home office for experimental journeys in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. As in the 15th / 16th / 17th Century, worlds far away from us were discovered, and we embark on digital adventures that are temporary, simultaneous, synchronous, asynchronous, independent of location. We decided to work with digital photography as a visual method for mainly two reasons. First, taking photos can be done relatively easy during a shut down in the home office. We can train creativity and visual perception without being in a university's studio. Second, photographs can be analyzed and compared with paintings and therefore criticized by their motifs, aesthetic representation, and within their time frame. Our visual souvenirs are photographs and videos in the mirror of illusion, immersion, and imagination

Rhizomatic Remediation: Adaptation in a Web-Based Art Praxis During Time(s) of Crises

Willingness and the ability to adapt is vital in time(s) of crises. Remediation provides one novel and useful example of adaptation in contemporary digital art. This study explores the personal experiences of an art practice moving to virtual exhibition spaces, both by choice and as a response to multiple simultaneous crises (pandemic, environmental, racial, and democractic). This research reflects on three distinct examples of individual, subjective experiences of art making and exhibiting during this sudden shift. Each example highlights different approaches and possibilities, and examines similarities and contrasts in scales (local, national. and international) as well as more specific forms of remediation and relocation. Key findings include the different forms of remediation (different ways the art is translated for digital presentation) as well as the value of postinternet aesthetics, posthuman metamorphosis, and the nonsite. These themes help narrate these experiences and reflect more on these scenarios in ways that might be useful to other artists, curators, creative thinkers and practitioners. A suggestion is made that these groups would benefit from recognizing the value of rhizomatic (multi-centered, interrelated, and inclusive) approaches that include active remediation and adaptation.