VÄHÄN VÄLIÄ – NÄYTTÄMÖN MEDIAALISUUS JA KOSKETUKSEN ARKKITEHTUURI on sekä teoreettinen tutkimus että kolmen esityksen ja kolmen esityksellisen installaation dokumentaatio. Maiju Loukolan tutkimus käsittelee mediaalista näyttämöä...
moreVÄHÄN VÄLIÄ – NÄYTTÄMÖN MEDIAALISUUS JA KOSKETUKSEN ARKKITEHTUURI on sekä teoreettinen tutkimus että kolmen esityksen ja kolmen esityksellisen installaation dokumentaatio.
Maiju Loukolan tutkimus käsittelee mediaalista näyttämöä aistimuksellisena ja tapahtumallisena skenografin näkökulmasta. Näyttämön, mediaalisuuden ja kosketuksen kytkökset ovat yhtäältä mediateknologioiden ja esityskäytäntöjen kysymyksiä. Loukolalle ne "välitteisyydessään" ovat vielä keskeisemmin yhteyden, kontaktin ja rajan käynnin kysymyksiä. Millaista kokemuksellisuutta mediatilan ja fyysisen tilan kohtaamisessa muodostuu? Miten tämä vaikuttaa katsoja-kokijaan? Näihin kysymyksiin vastatakseen Loukola hakeutuu fenomenologisiin ja mediafilosofisiin keskusteluihin.
Skenografia on Maiju Loukolalle ensisijaisesti tilan ymmärtämistä suhteiden ja dynamiikan lähtökohdista, jolloin tila jäsentyy kokemuksellisena ja aistinvaraisena – elettynä tilana ja tilanteena. Maiju Loukola purkaa käsityksiä mediateatterin skenografioista näkökeskeisinä kuvaesityksinä, jossa muut aistit kuten kosketus, kuulo, maku- tai hajuaistimukset sivuutetaan katseelle alisteisina.
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ANYWHERE NEAR – media scenographies and the architectures of touch
Maiju Loukola's artistic doctoral research focuses on the mediality of performance space, on theatricality of media, and experientality of projected image installations. She asks in her dissertation: how do the mediated & expanded practices of contemporary scenography and performance design affect our lived, aesthetic experience, and how do they structure our bodily perception in and as performative spatio-temporal event?
She contemplates the mediality of theatrical space/place as media scenographic situation with reference to media theoretical contact points, connected to conceptualisations of aesthetic experience, sensable perception and embodied visibility. With reference to her own involvement as practicing scenic artist she examines the experientality of projected image installations, through analyzing the relationship of mediality and touch.
Loukola's research consists of written thesis and of six artistic projects—three performances and three experimental installations. She approaches each artistic part with specific research questions, each from slightly different angle, reflecting art practice and theoretical analysis through each other. Loukola approaches video projections in all of the three performances and three installation projects as transformative and situation-sensitive scenographic medium.
Her art and research interests are influenced by the tradition and the contemporaneity of spatio-temporally oriented art forms focused on applications of moving image and image projection.
One of the central starting points of Loukola's doctoral study is intertwined with the expanded notion of scenography; Loukola approaches scenography in terms of evental & transformative space, of experientality and scenograhic action. With reference to the notion of scenography expanded, she understands scenography in terms of spatial, temporal and visual strategies that activate and transform the spectator’s embodied experience.
Also, she argues that the traditional conceptions and practices of expanded scenography vaguely meet the needs of today’s heterogeneous intermedial performative practices, combining the physical and the mediated space in increasingly divergent, hybrid, socially and technologically affected forms. For Loukola, the fact that our remediated experience is ever so evidently compositioned in between the actual and the virtual, calls for rearticulations of both the vocabulary and practices of performing arts and scenography as well. Loukola contributes in this discussion from a media sensitive point of view—grounded on the sensability of the body, bodily perception and on the notion of sensuous knowledge.
Loukola' central theoretical reference points are connected to two main directions: the notion of touch on the one hand, and contemplations of mediality on the other. She aims at making visible a certain in-betweennes that characterizes both touch and mediality – yet emphasizing the peculiar and inherent quality, characteristic to both, that at the same time is determined by certain tendency for ineradicable intimacy. Loukola argues, that from a media sensitive point of view the structure of mediated experience may be articulated with reference to a profound, even radical simultaneity of intimacy and distance; this tensional structure defines both touch and mediality, and in the frame of Loukola's study, this structural feature is called the "architecture of touch".
One of the key factors in Loukola's study is a phenomenological orientation that positions the body as the focal point of sense perception. Reading through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s "ontology of vision", it seems that sensibility and a certain structural "reversibility" inherent to touch builds as focal themes.
Her other theoretical focal point of reference is connected with the notion of "media" and its derivatives. Mediality is approached from a viewpoint where "media" are connected to both meaning making and the mediation of senses. Samuel Weber’s notion of "theatricality of media" and his thematizations of Walter Benjamin’s "translation theory" are central to Loukola's understanding of mediality in the scenic arts.