Phantom Power

How does a performance or an installation acquire substance? How does it come to matter to the people who experience it? And do we account for it?

The research project Phantom Power attempts to answer these broad questions by means of a descriptive study of three public performances and sound installations organised at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. Each case has been chosen for the specificity of what the invited artists (Leif Elggren, Arto Lindsay, Marja-leena Sillanpää, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela) call upon: electronic voice phenomena (EVP), the interiority of sound, and transport through sound. All three are the object of an ethnographic approach using original methodology: for each event, one day is devoted to the experience of performances and installations, followed by a discussion between the public and the artists, monitored by guest researchers (Vinciane Despret, Salomé Voegelin and Juliette Volcler).

The next day 1st-year BA students in Fine Arts re-enact the performances in front of the artists themselves. In other words, the chosen methodology offers a collective conceptual analysis on the first day and a collective analysis through practice on the second day. This is meant to help produce a field survey account of sound and of the narratives and the relational modes of existence of the works.

Phantom Power is a research project initiated by the BA in Visual Arts' department at ECAL. It questions the social configurations of the non-audible narratives of aural practices in performances and public sound installations.