Barometric Bodies. Mapping uncertainty from a first-person perspective.

We set out to map the conditions and affective trajectories of the status quo by superimposing our selves with two characters exaggerating our own averageness. „Sandra and Heiko“ would be the neatly gendered German couple locked in togetherness that was meant to be our frame for exploring the affordances of a mediatized pandemic. We installed an always-on surveillance camera, a greenscreen, plenty of digital equipment, and ourselves.

While there was a lot going on to play with, we had to operate out of a general numbing tension: between heightened awareness for bodies-as-danger and ubiquitous media technology as a means of (dis/re)embodying presence; between our liberalized distributed subjectivities and the suddenly much more tangible State as a normalizer of emergency, between shifting notions of „inside“ and „outside“.


The conditions we were working under did not favor producing a concise work of art, but rather a bricolage of formats, rhythms, and relationalities trying to capture the various ways of coping and sensemaking that were „in the air“. The discursively dominating themes were distance, transmission, and infection: atmospheric issues that we somehow needed to channel through our bodies – the very bodies filming, acting, and editing our footage. We moved between home computer work, physical exercise, Zoom calls, drinking tea, gaming, political telegram groups, sewing, gun practice, more computer work, a looming burnout, and the beginnings of a nationwide protest movement against pandemic restrictions that culminated in a run on the German parliament building a year later but started just then outside of a Berlin theater, 20 minutes on foot from our flat.


Using what we produced back then as an example, I want to think about artistic research practice configuring bodies as conduits. The ambiguous bystander, the unreliable witness, the defecting agent – conduits processing the present as un/knowable, making it il/legible to others and themselves – as virtual contact traces, viral politics, affective broadcasting, distributed selfhoods, absent flesh, and the slimy now.”


90-minute lecture followed by discussion


(IN GERMAN)