"Yesterday I stood in front of the mirror and told a bunch of jokes to myself, I don’t think I performed for myself, but rather prepared myself for what would come."
2016

Performance ca. 30 minutes

With: Jason Dean Holness-Vandercamp and Guiuseppa Baahwa Addo
In this performance Sandra Mujinga explores standup comedy and internet memes, through conversations between two performers and their close personal relationship. In a TV-show set-up Mujinga presents sound as a private space and different audio-samples displaces the performers’ interaction with each other and the audience. Pre-recorded audio of the performers from Whatsapp voicemails functions as a form of audible descriptions in the “Snapchat history” format.

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Images can be found here

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AUTO FLT AP OFF
The performance series AUTO FLT AP OFF at X AND BEYOND presents four nights with new performances by Sidsel Christensen, Sandra Mujinga, Jenny Gräf and Louise Haugaard Jørgensen. The works deal in different ways with systemic behaviour and technological processes of automation in times where language increasingly is made up of codes and symbols, and where navigating in physical space is done
helped by computers.

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The series takes a thematic starting point in the Air France Flight 447 crash into the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Rio to Paris in 2009. The following reports describe a line of errors and misinteractions carried out by the pilots leading to the tragic event.

This has led to a wider criticism of the pilots’ ability to re-take control of the aircraft when the system fails. And in a broader perspective, it opens a discussion about the consequences of technological communication undergoing processes of automation and standardization— leaving people increasingly dependent upon operating systems that they do not have real insight into. The final reports on the flight accident conclude that it is likely the crash would not have occurred, had it been 10 years earlier; the pilots back then would have had the necessary knowledge to retake control of the plane and avoid stalling it into the ocean.

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Philosopher Paul Virilio writes in his book “The Original Accident”: “Unlike the natural accident the artificial accident results from the innovation of a motor or of some substantial material. Whether the sinking of the Titanic or the eruption of the Chernobyl nuclear power station- emblematic catastrophes of the past century - the issue raised by the accidental event is not so much that of an iceberg surging up in the North Atlantic on a certain night in 1912, or that of a divergent nuclear reactor on a certain day in 1986. The issue is the building of an unsinkable ocean liner or the setting up of an atomic power station close to residential zones.”(Virilio: The Original Accident, 2007, p. 9.) And one might add the automated aircraft. The paradox of the invention of the automated aircraft is that it overrules and corrects human interaction with the machine to prevent human error however it still relies on human agency in some unforeseen cases.

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AUTO FLT AP OFF is the code the aircraft control system indicates when the autopilot has switched off. “To switch off the autopilot” is a term widely used to describe what it means to move from a state of absence to a state of presence; about the decoupling of automated activity in order to engage differently and attentively with the given moment or context. In art and academia, system errors figuratively speaking, is a way to break out of the routine – and the accident in this regard can be read as signs or opportunities. To return to Virilio: “According to Aristotle, ‘the accident reveals the substance.’ If so, then the invention of the ‘substance’ is equally invention of the ‘accident’. The shipwreck is consequently the ‘futurist’ invention of the ship, and the aircraft crash the invention of the supersonic airliner...” (ibid p. 5)

Sidsel Christensen, Sandra Mujinga, Jenny Gräf and Louise Haugaard Jørgensen have been invited to make new works which seek to explore the moment when the autopilot switches off. All artists work with staging the body that navigates in a world dominated by operative systems, codes and complexity-reduced communication and the flight analogy functions as a catalyst in the performance series where the performances are referred to as “simulators”. Visitors are invited into four different “simulators” in which a state of automatism is interrupted and replaced by a differently demanding, critical or trying situation. The four performances differ in their use of media and expression and will range from participatory performance installations to illustrative and abstract works.

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The series is curated by Maria Bordorff and Lotte Løvholm at the invita-tion of X AND BEYOND.

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