Porjects, News:
4.2.23 | "The Owl Lab: When the Body Breathes New Life into the Archive", an excellent review by Joy Bernard at Magazin Portfolio [Hebrew]
7.1.23-18.3.23 | The OWL Lab exhibition at Mamuta Art and Resesarch Center
14.9.22-1.12.22 | The OWL lab members (Monka, Dolev, Tal, Eidelman and Lockard) at the Azrieli Gallery
31.5.22 | Presentation at the conference "I am not a text"
25.4.22 | The OWL LAB at THE DYBBUK - Undisciplining the Archive
(from Biblioscopy by Hadassa Goldvicht. Image credit: Naama Mokadi)
At the heart of Eyal Bitton and Amir Meir’s project stands a restored analog Moog synthesizer that was used by the researcher and composer Yosef Tal. Beside the instrument, a documentary-fiction film will be shown. This film deals with the archeology of the medium, the poetics of the device, and stories of its pioneers. Lonnie Monka, following the poet David Antin, will use interactive transcription stations that he created in collaboration with Eran Hadas. His work researches the meeting of speech, text, and the historical avant-garde. The choreographer Mica Kupfer focuses on the traces of movement that the processual history of choreographic work is not able to preserve. In an attempt to maintain a memory of the lost “raw material,” she produces footprints and sound in a space where the body no longer remains. The musician Ruth Danon researches alternative ways of producing music, through an investigation of tremor – an involuntary rhythmic movement that involves body parts vibrating. This investigation will check which sounds the body creates when it tremors and what this free shaking reveals. At the center of Guy Dolev’s work, there are “blind” images of watching without sight or consciousness. With the help of a slide projector, which was used by the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University, Dolev documents an eye operation that is projected on a huge monitor at the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. For both the hospital and the university, projection is used for initiation into a discipline and discourse of the gaze. Drawing from memory throughout the exhibition, Davíd Lockard will create maps of Kfar Shaul. This work is an attempt to express an ongoing personal interest in issues related to forgetting and the connection between the representation of a space and the attempt to recall what happened there. The actress and performance artist Sharon Tal researches the past as an experiential means that produces alternative narratives. Her work is based on her relationship with her father as together they perform a dialogue written in collaboration with the writer Mai Resh. Ronen Eidelman established the Institute for Positive Technology, an activist research institute that examines the role and uses of surveillance technology in contemporary society. The basic assumptions of the institute are that we have the ability to amplify the benefits of surveillance technologies and to better cope with their inherent dangers – turning the worrisome into the familiar, the complex into the understood, and the negative into the positive. Hadassa Goldvicht will present a fragment from a long-term documentation project. The fragment focuses on signs of life that were recorded in the warehouse of the National Library, in Givat Ram, which are being emptied in preparation for the library’s move to a new location.
Enter the Node, Eyal Bitton and Amir Meir. Image Credit: Naama Mokadi.
Tour by David Lockard. Image Credit: Naama Mokadi.
OWL LAB - Objects, Words and Labyrinths. An Attempt to Get Lost in Performance Research
Lab Director: Diego Rotman (Department of Theater Studies & Sala-manca Group)
Project Partner: Lea Mauas (Sala-manca Group & Mamuta Art and Reserach Center)
The Owl Lab is a performance laboratory founded as part of the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in collaboration with the Mamuta Art and Research Center. From its inception, the lab was born out of a desire to explore and create through a range of concepts and practices, such as reenactment, hacking, and the reuse of obsolete technological equipment (deemed “purposeless”), alongside new uses of archival materials, teaching materials, and past pedagogical and performative practices. These materials and practices serve as primary sources in the development of research and artistic projects.
The Owl Lab aims to investigate different ways of transmitting knowledge as well as (de-)archivization. These topics are addressed by reading texts, reviewing the documentation of relevant projects, meeting artists, and discussing re-enactment and embodiment options for performances (whether artistic, everyday, or pedagogical). The goal of these activities is to explore new-old ways of research, in general, and especially art-based research.
Besides experimenting with "purposeless" objects, which have lost their use (i.e. the obsolete), the lab raises questions about the impact of technological innovations as they shape experiences—including artistic, performative and pedagogical experiences. Of particular importance to the lab is how these technological innovations, especially in the visual and auditory realms, have influenced and continue to influence aesthetics and poetics in the following fields: performance; the culture of viewing, hearing, and learning; the reception, absorption, and interpretation of performance; and the audience's participation in performances.
The main goals of the Owl Lab are to:
- Create a community of researchers and artists dedicated to performance research;
- Grant new life to equipment that has gone into disuse, as part of poetic and aesthetic practices in performance;
- Investigate the history of teaching and research (in and out of academia) and examine the tension between performance and distant learning, as well as between performance and learning with a present audience and community;
- Engage with performative reenactment as an aesthetic practice for the creation and transmission of knowledge.
Fellows 2022:
Eyal Bitton (with Eran Sachs, Amir Meir and Tomer Damsky) [more soon]
Lonnie Monka (fellow and assistant)
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