Corin Sworn – ‘In Reflection, Shimmer’
Design: Maeve Redmond
‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ is the final instalment of Corin Sworn’s project ‘Moving in Relation’, a series of events exploring social relations with ‘smart’ technologies: AI-enabled, consumer-grade products that attempt to learn and produce data from interactions with humans.
Corin Sworn,‘Where the Deciduous are Leafed in Winter’. Installation view, The Common Guild, 2023. Photo: Ruth Clark.
‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ is an installation comprising video, atmospheric sound, vocal audio and sculptural collage. Both sound and image are dispersed across the exhibition space, creating a broad sensorial address. The video, ‘A Fuzzy Set’ (2023) presents a history of motion capture that aligns organic movement, such as gesture, to machinic ordering systems. Dancers are shown, testing the functional limits of video in AI enabled CCTV security systems that identify potential ‘life' through movement. Inventions by Charles Rees Wilson, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Marie Van Brittan Brown are presented as precursors of contemporary motion capture, in each case this moves the devices away from the inventor’s initial intention. A Fuzzy Set’ examines divergent forms of motion capture, challenging 20th century notions of efficiency as ‘the one best way’.
Each instalment of ‘Moving in Relation’ has sought new ways of engaging and understanding technological systems and algorithmic thought. Over the course of an extended period of research Sworn brought together various collaborators in movement, sound, poetry and academia to establish ways of approaching and living with networked technology and machine learning devices. Attempting to apprehend these now ubiquitous devices on human terms, Sworn explores AI behaviours in emotive and playful ways, observing our intimate and attentive relationships with automatic tools.
Corin Sworn,‘A Fuzzy Set’ (video). Installation View, The Common Guild, 2023. Photo: Ruth Clark.
'Moving in Relation' began in 2021 with 'eco-co-location', a live one-off performance exploring encounters with algorithmic thought that took place in a vacant office space within a suburban business park. ‘This Harmonic Chamber’, Sworn’s second performance – an incomplete, future film taking shape as a performance lecture with experimental sound – was presented in 2022 in a 19th century loom shed.
Further encounters in the series have included an interview with political philosopher Louise Amoore, and ‘The Virtual Boulevard’ – a gathering of poets from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Glasgow to work across geographies and alongside AI translation systems, supported by online tools for communication. Collaborators working with Sworn have included Luke Fowler, Jer Reid, nussatari, Cecelia Pavon, SPAM Zine & Press, George Hampton Wale, and Guy Veal.
Further Info
Project Details
‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ to place at 60 York Street Glasgow, G2 8JX, The Common Guild’s temporary premises.
Credits
Movement: Molly Danter; Caitlin Taylor and Isabel Umali
Dramaturgy: Jeremy Reid
Camera: Corin Sworn and Ambroise Leclerc
Sound Design: Luke Fowler
Sound: Jeremy Reid; Luke Fowler; Simon Weins; Feronia Wennborg; Duncan Marquiss; Phil Julian and Darren Hayman
Consultation: Timothy Lem-Smith and Louise Amoore
Thanks: Grace Jackson; Becheala Walker; Neil Grey; Bridget Fowler; Chloe Reith; Katrina Brown; Victoria Brooks; Ian Hameli; Eric Brucket; The Common Guild installation team, Jonny Lyons and Dan Griffiths.
Related
Moving in Relation 4. The Virtual Boulevard
Image: Courtesy of Alice Brooke.
The Virtual Boulevard is an experimental translation workshop collaboration bringing together invited poets in Glasgow and Buenos Aires. It forms part of Corin Sworn’s experimental series ‘Moving in Relation’.
Sworn is joined by Buenos Aires based poet, translator and tutor Cecilia Pavón who leads translation experiments between poets in Spanish and English, encompassing dialects and colloquial languages spoken in Buenos Aires and Glasgow. Through translation, the poets explore overlapping and imagined localities between the two cities, shared and contrasting sites of struggle and antagonism, roving intimacies and literary friendship across continents. No knowledge of either English or Spanish is required — the artists aim to probe the playful potential of ‘intra-languages’and miscommunication, as encountered through human relationships with technology.
The workshop is organised by Cecilia Pavón, Corin Sworn and SPAM Zine. Participants include valentín etchegaray, Nasim Luczaj, María Muchut, Gloria Dawson, Camila Gassiebayle, Lucy Rose Cunningham and JJ Romero.
Cecilia Pavón was born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1973. She holds a BA in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1999 she cofounded the independent art space and small press Belleza y Felicidad, Buenos Aires. She has published poetry and short stories in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. As a translator from German and English into Spanish, Pavón has translated Diedrich Diederichsen, Chris Kraus, Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, Werner Schroeter, and others.
Pavon has published numerous books of poetry and short stories, in 2021 Little Joy, an anthology of 35 short stories was published in English by Semiotext(e) as part of its Native Agents series.
A publication by SPAM, including poetry from the workshop and photographs from Alice Brooke and will be released in 2024.
Project Details
This event took place online with invited participants selected by Corin Sworn and Cecilia Pavón.
Related
Friday Event / Corin Sworn
Corin Sworn, 'This Harmonic Chamber' (performance still) (2022), from the series 'Moving in Relation' (2021-22). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Alan Dimmick.
The Common Guild is collaborating with The Glasgow School of Art to present a Friday Event with artist Corin Sworn as part of the School of Fine Art’s long-running lecture series.
Corin Sworn works with performance, video, distributed narrative, and installation, using storytelling, material encounters and interactive technologies as tools of enquiry. Sworn is interested in the art gallery as a communicative apparatus, and as a site for opening investigation into technological devices. In her installations, apparently nascent technologies, from robot ‘vision’ systems to cloud computing, become framing devices through which to think, reflect and imagine.
Previous projects have employed “to-do” lists and artificial sweeteners; depicted chemical interactions as colour fields; and have explored the history of the camera as a technology that separated knowledge from the body.
Sworn is currently working with The Common Guild on the investigative performance series ‘Moving in Relation’ (2021-present). This series brings together collaborators working in movement, sound and academic thought to research material encounters with algorithmic thought, datafication and its influence on physical bodies.
Corin Sworn & nussatari, 'eco-co-location' (2021). Photo: George Hampton Wale.
Corin Sworn’s exhibitions include: Cumulo with URRA Buenos Aires (2022); OCAT Shenzhen (2021) Edinburgh Art Festival (2019); Gallery Arsenal, Poland (2016); Toronto Film Festival (2016); Collezione Maramotti, Italy (2015); Whitechapel Gallery, UK (2015); Langen Foundation, Germany (2015); Sydney Biennial, Australia (2014); Scotland+Venice at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Art Now, Tate Britain (2011).
Sworn was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2014 and a Leverhulme Prize in 2016. She is Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University and works with Kendall Koppe Gallery.
The Friday Event is a visiting speaker series presented by the School of Fine Art (SoFA) at The Glasgow School of Art. With a long illustrious past and a bright future, the series hosts artists, writers, curators, academics, students and other cultural figures, welcoming and broadening dialogue and knowledge of local and international fields. Happening on campus and online, the Friday Event is always open to all.
Project Details
The Friday Event takes place on Friday 10 March at 11am – 12.30pm in person at the Reid Lecture Theatre and online.
Location
Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street Glasgow G3 6RQ
Tickets
Friday Events are open to all. Non-GSA attendees should book a free ticket below.
Attend Online
The Friday Event will be streamed online.
Related
Moving in Relation 3. Louise Amoore interviewed by Corin Sworn
Corin Sworn & Claricia Parinussa, 'eco-co-location' (2021). Photo: George Hampton Wale.
The third instalment in Corin Sworn's research series 'Moving in relation' takes the form of a conversation between Corin Sworn and political philosopher Louise Amoore, now available to listen online.
Louise Amoore is author of 'Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others' (2020) and lecturer at Durham University whose research has informed Sworn’s current investigative performance practice.
Sworn and Amoore discuss understanding algorithms, AI ethics, and the intimacy that connects together human and algorithmic relations. With reference to Sworn’s performances ‘eco-co-location’ and ‘This Harmonic Chamber’ they consider what place these technologies occupy in the world.
Touching on different histories of science and the prioritisation of rationality over embodied knowledge, algorithms are understood as an arrangement of propositions which are often used to model likelihood. Algorithms shape and are shaped by their porous engagement with the world; they participate in generative algorithm-to-algorithm relationships and demonstrate fallibility through enacting logics of misrecognition or ‘algorithmic madness’. Sworn and Amoore’s conversation reflects on the ways algorithms inform our everyday perception and impact how we interact with one another from an interpersonal to a judicial level.
Event Details
Listen –
With thanks to Louise Amoore.
Sound Editing: Corin Sworn
Additional Sound Editing: Duncan Marquiss
Related
Room for Reading / Corin Sworn
As part of Corin Sworn’s investigative performance series, ‘Moving in Relation’, the artist has selected two recent publications that have informed her ongoing research into human interrelationships with technology.
‘The Atlas of Anomalous AI’ edited by Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell and Louise Amoore, ‘Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others’.
Corin Sworn has selected Ignota Books’ ‘The Atlas of Anomalous AI’ (2020) edited by Ben Vickers and and K Allado-McDowell and Louise Amoore, ‘Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others’ (2020).
“These books situate the collection and interpretation of digital data amid a history of devices built to grapple with mapping futurity and the unknown. ‘The Atlas of Anomalous AI’ is a beautiful compendium of objects and plans for ordering and predicting, drawn from across world history and into the present day. The collection circles and displaces a Western power, seeking to determine what is and is not admissible in cosmologies of recognition and futurity.
Louise Amoore considers, from various angles, the inherent unknowability and experimental nature of algorithmic devices. ‘Cloud Ethics’ draws from theorists within the social sciences to flag how power deploys and trims this open-ended seeking to harness and determine its own orders of the possible. Here, ethics lies in how the credible is determined as we reach into the imaginary.”
Corin Sworn
Details
In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.
Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.
Related
Moving in Relation 2. ‘This Harmonic Chamber’ – Corin Sworn, Jer Reid and Luke Fowler
Corin Sworn, 'This Harmonic Chamber' (performance still) (2022), from the series 'Moving in Relation' (2021-22). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Alan Dimmick.
Corin Sworn, Jer Reid and Luke Fowler present ‘This Harmonic Chamber’ – an incomplete, future film taking shape as a live performance lecture, with experimental sound and moving image.
Set within a distinctive redbrick factory – a former loom shed built in the 19th century – the performance deliberately plays with the apparently immaterial qualities of sound to physically reverberate this dense material site.
Through a deconstruction of the formal tactics of the lecture, Sworn describes a history that disconnects empirical philosophy from contemporary physics, charting intrinsic relationships between knowledge, idiosyncrasy and sensory experience. In parallel, the sonic performance amplifies the physical experience of sound unfolding within the space through vibratory resonances and echoes, building a palpably rich atmosphere.
‘This Harmonic Chamber’ is entangled in dichotomies of the material and immaterial, and speculation and sensation. The performance lecture teases out experiences of wavering uncertainty felt both bodily and mentally.
Throughout the performance, the spoken text can be followed online on mobile devices by scanning a QR code available at the venue. Fragments of video which accompany the lecture can also be viewed here through the same link.
‘This Harmonic Chamber’ is the second in a series of events entitled ‘Moving in Relation’ through which Sworn continues to research human interrelationships with technology. Working with dancers, academics and non-human collaborators, Sworn is developing a discursive and experimental event series that explores algorithmic thought, datafication and their influence on physical bodies, while seeking to make obscure knowledge immanent and palpable.
The first event, ‘eco-co-location’ by Corin Sworn and nussatari was presented within a suburban business park in the Clyde Valley in November 2021.
Further Info
Access the spoken text performed as part of ‘This Harmonic Chamber’ here. Available for a limited time.
Project Details
‘This Harmonic Chamber’ took place at 105 French Street, G40 4JS. The performance lasted c.40 minutes.
Read
Access the spoken text performed as part of ‘This Harmonic Chamber’ here. Available for a limited time.
Credits
Performance:
Scores and Sound: Corin Sworn, Jer Reid, Luke Fowler
Sound Engineer: Richie Dempsey
Costume: La Fetiche, Kenneth Thompson
Production and Website: Grace Jackson
Video (Online):
Movement: Molly Danter
Dramaturge: Jer Reid
Camera: Ambroise Leclerc / Paradax Period
Related
Corin Sworn – ‘Moving in Relation’
Corin Sworn, 'eco-co-location' (performance still) (2021), from the series 'Moving in Relation' (2021-22). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: George Hampton Wale.
Corin Sworn’s investigative series ‘Moving in Relation’ brings together collaborators working in movement, sound and academic thought to research human interrelationships with technology in real time.
Instalments will be presented in public, beginning in 2021 and cumulating in 2023, encompassing a body of research which explores material encounters with algorithmic thought, datafication and its influence on physical bodies. Events takes on an active experimental form, such as the structure of a rehearsal or a public lecture, to examine technical processes such as cloud computing, seeking to make obscure knowledge immanent and palpable.
‘Moving in Relation’ negotiates and performs real-time research and group learning with each event gathering together a temporary discursive community.
Further Info
Corin Sworn is supported by Creative Scotland.
‘eco-co-location’ was supported by Leverhulme Trust.
Project Details
‘Moving in Relation’ was a series of five events which took place between November 2021 – December 2023.
‘eco-co-location’ took place place in a business park in the Clyde Valley on 27 November 2021.
‘This Harmonic Chamber’ was presented in a former loom shed built in the 19th century on 7 April 2022.
Louise Amoore interviewed by Corin Sworn took place online and is available to listen via the link below.
‘The Virtual Boulevard’ an experimental translation workshop took place online between poets in Glasgow and Buenos Aires.
Exhibition ‘In Reflection, Shimmer’ was presented at 60 York Street from 25 November – 16 December 2023.
A publication, ‘Moving in Relation’ will be released in 2024.
Related
Moving in Relation 1. ‘eco-co-location’ – Corin Sworn and nussatari
Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Corin Sworn and nussatari present eco-co-location – a live one-off performance in a vacant office space within a near-empty suburban business park. Emerging through physical and verbal discussions, the performance explores dispersed sensation and variously suspended and compressed timeframes in response to this lapsed infrastructure of late capitalist administration.
Moving within the vast, stripped-out space, Sworn and Parinussa draw attention to the broad cloudscape visible through the building’s encircling windows. Clouds, employed as signifiers of data storage, insinuate connection between the material world and the complex concealed processes of corporate industries which, while remaining hidden and obscured, present as insubstantial, almost transcendent, ephemeral non-places.
Yet clouds, as shape shifting systems of condensation, have also long served as playful sites for shape spotting and make believe. As such, they can also speak to algorithmic machines which in a similar way, condense data whilst seeking to extrude patterns. These machines do so largely through correlation and abduction, seeking plausible generative associations without recourse to verification.
To engage these (in)operative metaphors and their associated processes nussa and Sworn have spent a period working into the affective qualities of feedback, delay and orientation amid systems that distribute sensation and trouble connection with echo.
This is the first in a series of five events entitled ‘Moving in Relation’ through which Sworn continues to research human interrelationships with technology. Working with dancers, academics and 'robot vision' equipped cameras, Sworn is developing a discursive and experimental event series that explores algorithmic thought, datafication and their influence on physical bodies while seeking to make obscure knowledge immanent and palpable.
Further Info
Corin Sworn wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust, Creative Scotland and CCA, Glasgow.
Project Details
eco-co-location took place in a business park in the Clyde Valley. Coach travel was provided to and from the location. The performance lasted c.40 minutes.
Credits
Performance with sonic and sculptural installation: nussatari and Corin Sworn.
Sound Composition: nussatari,
Soft Sculpture and Costume: George Hampton Wale.
Sound technician: Guy Veale.
Film: Ambroise of Paradax Period.