Fognomenology:
Feeling Fog From Within

Fog
Noun
1. Weather: a thick cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere at or near the earth's surface which obscures or restricts visibility (to a greater extent than mist; strictly, reducing visibility to below 1 km).

2. Confusion: a state or cause of perplexity or confusion, usually mentally or emotionally. 

Phenomenology
Noun 
1. The study of phenomena (things that exist and can be seen, felt, tasted, etc.) and how the being experiences them. 
2. Approach and research method in which researchers focus on studying human experiences, including the way people conceptualize their lived, shared experiences.

 

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Fognomenology: Feeling Fog From Within presents an ongoing research in performance from the perspective of two makers/performers. This performance-based artistic research is about fog. The materiality of fog. But also the phenomenological experience of fog. The power of the fog and its potential to make things disappear. It can make one feel disoriented or reoriented in a new medium, a new environment. Something disappears just to make something else appear. This phenomenological experience is bodily felt, it is immersive. Fog is the main character of this experiential exploration. 

Just like fog, this research is hard to pin down. Our contribution is therefore made of two different layers: a text-based structure presenting chronologically our practice and the main landmarks of our fog-research in performance from 2022 till present day, and a speech-based cloud layer spread across the text. Ryan and Mar’s recorded voices interview each other, sharing honest, intimate, foggy reflections of personal fog-experiences full of silences, hesitations and pondering. Sometimes these audio snippets might drift, might float, might linger. As we invite the user to drift, float, linger, too. The audio snippets are labeled with a number indicating their chronological time sequence. However, they are presented in a dispersed cloud structure curated in correlation to the text. This text is an open-ended journey, a narration of facts, moments, experiences, reflections and decisions weaved with the artists and artworks that sparked our imagination and still fuel our practices with fog. In this curated combination of text and sound the user can freely float from one medium to the other or combine them simultaneously, covering and uncovering the text with a layer of sound. In committing to fog in our artistic practice we also commit to blurriness, borderless, opacity. We give the user the possibility to have a different experience each time; more or less dense, more or less foggy, and above all to let the mind wander and wonder.  

 

 

 

FOG
Spring 2022​

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This research looks at fog as a material of wonderment that revels in the perception of the imperceptible and the appearance of disappearance. Rather than seeing the disappearance as something negative, we take it as an opportunity to drift, to let imagination fly. Not this, nor that, neither this, nor that. The scale of greys, the scale of fog densities. Not thick, not completely clear, always in between, always barely, almost seen, almost almost almost, barely barely barely, the difficulty of recognising something and the phenomenological experience of something else.  A process of temporary appearance and disappearance, a constant fade in and fade out that makes our sensorial perception linger in liminal states: the potential of the barely seen.

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The research started in 2022 when Ryan looked out of his bedroom window, where he could usually see the magnificent and solid tower of Eusebius church Arnhem, but on one particular morning he couldn’t. It had gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Both, there and not there at the same time. The natural phenomena of fog was truly phenomenal but also something that could be used in a theatre space, recreated. A city had disappeared as an idea for artistic research in performance emerged. 

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​From Ambivalence 

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Autumn 2022 

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​The research of fog became entwined with Ryan’s research on Ambivalence as part of his time at Home of Performance Practices Master at ArtEZ (2021-2023). 

The research drifted into several topics but fog was becoming a bigger part of the research. In this process, Ryan understood that fog is inherently ambivalent. Fog is always doing two things at the same time: (un)covering, (dis)appearing, (im)percevable. 

Engaging with words that have two meanings (un)covers an interesting methodology of the research:  Ambivalence as a method of play.  Smashing two words, two notions, two approaches together, Fog and Phenomenology for example, and then entering into a discourse around the meaning of the resultant neologism and the new spaces it opens in creative processes.  The very structure of this article can be (im)perceived as an ambivalent one: the user could be listening to Mar answering a question whilst reading these very words.  

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Fog has the ability to make the air visible: light beams can appear solid in space. The Solid Light exhibition by Anthony McCall (a collection of works from 1973 till 2018 curated together) is a clear example of illuminating the air through the use of projected light beams. The use of fog in this context allows the invisible light to become a visible structure. The first interaction that many visitors have with this piece is putting their hands through the light beams - almost as if checking that the light beam is not solid, a playful interaction confirming the simple illusion is real. 

 

However fog also makes tangible objects invisible, shrouded, covered, (un)seen. The church tower slowly came back into view but it emerged slowly, the edges, the borders last to come into view. Fog is neither A nor B but something in-between. 

The impossibility to define a clear sharp solid border. Fog is making something else as a combination of both layers. Disorientating. From ambivalence, we wafted into fog as a main companion to experiment with. 

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​​​UMMM YEAH OKAY AND?
Winter 2022-2023

 

By this time, a small gang of collaborators, students and graduates from MA Performance Practices, Mar Esteban Martin, Antti Uimonen, Andrea van der Kuil, Ermis Christodoulou, had joined the project - investigating the performative powers of fog in order to create UMMM YEAH OKAY AND? (UYOA), a theatre performance that was presented in 2023 at ArtEZ as Ryan’s final project. 

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​During the rehearsals, artificial fog was produced by a hazer and a smoke machine. The ethereal material displayed inside of the theatre fascinated us and again, placing our bodies in the midst of that environment, we became interested in the phenomenological power of the material. The immersiveness was always an essential point. Being immersed, giving the possibility for immersion, allowing people to immerse. Feeling it on our skins, covering front, back, side, up, side, down, over, below. We understood we wanted to shroud an audience within the fog. To cover them in it. To make them feel the phenomenological power of it from the inside and eventually see their and our bodies disappearing. 

 

Ryan had encountered Olafur Eliasson’s immersive fog installation: Din Blinde Passager, (2010), where people are invited to walk down a 90-meter-long tunnel densely filled with fog. 

The fog shrouds all who are walking through; challenging their sense of orientation, seeing bodies appear and disappear simply by changing ones proximity was particularly interesting to experience. It’s a bodily-felt experience. The act of immersion within UYOA, shrouding an audience, was born from this specific piece. The notion of using fog as a material appears in many other Elaison works: Your blind movement (2010), Feelings are facts (2010) or Fog assembly (2016). The materiality of fog became a cornerstone of the research - instead of fog being a bi-product or an effect, it felt important that fog was seen as a performer with its own agency in the work itself. 

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Keeping fog as a performative partner was at the core of our practices. Its agency is a non-controllable factor in our work: not knowing how it will affect the visual, the context, the situation, our actions and how they were perceived. We perform, fog performs with us, moving in whichever way it wants too.  

 

In UYOA, the audience were sat in traverse, allowing the fog to hover 360-degrees around them. The audience never quite getting the whole picture, forced into an in-between state where they could see performers disappear and reappear, objects melt into the unknown, the walls of the theatre became blurred and by covering the space in fog, by concealing it, cloaking the space, we made it bigger. By not seeing the walls of the room the room didn’t exist at all, the space was now limitless. 

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​Sometimes this became dangerous or overwhelming. A dangerous gas. In rehearsals we would find walls where we thought there was space, crash into objects and meet each other in unexpected ways. Fog is not without risk. 

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NIGHTCLUBBING 

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2022 - ongoing 

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“Perhaps smoke’s sole reliable qualities are inconstancy and contradiction. It represents immateriality and dissolution…It is an inconstant ally, a double agent that disappears not quite without trace”.

(Hayes and O’Reilly, 2008)

 

Nightclubbing was an important stage of the research. On a series of nights out, Ryan would frantically scribble his thoughts (in a fog log), hungover and hazy the next day. Like the walls of the theatre, the walls of the club filled with smoke also became limitless. 

We overheard a manager of a club say “at the beginning of the night, you pump the room full of smoke so it appears less empty”. 

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The smoke was fueling peoples experiences, helping them in conjunction with the low frequency music (and possible other substances) to lose themselves, to lose themselves in the moment, in the beat, in their environment. To disappear and (re)appear multiple times, to (re)negotiate orientation. Nightclubbing scenarios became an evident inspiration for our work, expressed in Ummm Yeah Okay And? (UYOA) by creating a dramaturgical conduit between three different environments: nature, theatre and nightclub.

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UMMM YEAH OKAY AND? BOOK

Spring-Summer 2023​​

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A book was created to accompany the performance of Ummm Yeah Okay And?. The book took on a split, ambivalent structure with each page cut into two pages meaning paragraphs would be spliced into two pieces and would re-emerge joined by half of a different paragraph or an image spliced into two would take on new meanings when mixed. 

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The research into the materials and methods was particularly present during the making of the book, again with the intention to pursue the qualities of fog and fogginess.

Riso printing gave the images a grainy, fog-like quality. We identified there is a shrouding quality to the Riso ink; covering the page but not quite, not always. Uncontrollable. The Riso printing revels in imperfections, glories in the in-between of blank paper and full image. Different thickness of tracing papers were also experimented with creating a uniformed blanket of opacity when laid over text. 

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​UYOA at DeSchool Nightclub
Autumn  2023

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A few months after we first performed UYOA, we presented the work at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival. The location of our performance: a nightclub. 

It was a bunker-like space that smelt of beer, damp and sweat - the residue of nights before.  The research on nightclubbing was on full display as audiences felt the nightclub environment with all their senses. Performing in this location made us experience and think about fog/smoke as a connecting tissue - a conduit between the theatre and the night club.

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By shrouding the audience within the fog, immersing them with it - there was an invitation to think about the phenomenological effect of fog; the awe of disappearing surroundings. There's a hope that audiences might think about this phenomenological effect when they encounter fog in an outside environment too. 

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FOG BOX at YPNOTICA
Spring 2024

 

By spring 2024, Ryan had completed the masters and therefore his research into ambivalence was completed. However, something remained unfinished, un-concluded, uncontained. The research into the phenomenological awe of fog continued to float inside the heads of the makers. These thoughts, like fog, seemed to have no end. 

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Next was a commision by Amsterdam collective YPNOTICA to make a performative installation addressing fog at a nightclub. FOG BOX was a see-through, shower-cubicle sized box built from acrylic perspex with one performer inside. The fog slowly released inside the box and the body of the performer disappeared into the dense fog, contained within the see-through box. Floating movements echoed the drifting fog, opposing the rhythmic, fast-paced, thudding beats. The performer’s limbs would emerge - a hand with no body, a headless torso and then submerge back into the fog creating an in-between state; fragments of the performer constantly appearing, disappearing. Originally, the sculpture work of Anthony Gormley was a reference, most notably Another Place (1997) or more recently, the exhibition Time Horizon (2024), depicting life-size figures standing, or in Time Horizon’s case sinking into the ground. Gormley’s work tackles the body itself as a volume, it can make the viewer think about how much space a single human body occupies. FOG BOX almost becomes a negative of Gormley's work: the fog becoming the plaster mold around the human figure. This concept can also be seen in Marc Quinn’s sculpture 12½ % Proof (1993), displayed in the Arnhem Museum. It's almost like a static version of FOG BOX: a standing figure encased within a fog filled box, although the sculpture doesn't use fog, just foggy, murky glass and liquid to make the surface blurry. During our years as ArtEZ students, we visited the museum multiple times, stopping in front of Quinn’s work  without knowing that a few years later FOG BOX would be made. Unlike Quinn's sculpture, FOG BOX is interested in the performance of the fog as well as the aliveness of the body inside, the fog being released into the box allowing the observer to physically see the body disappear. It revels in the movement of the fog itself. 

 

FOG BOX marks the second performance featuring fog as the main character and a development in the performance-based research. The perspex box contains the fog, displaying it - in a museum-like container, the fog as an exhibit. The free-wheeling material, enclosed and trapped but still moving, still whirling and shape-making as the performer slowly moves from within. The phenomenological impact on its audience also shifts. FOG BOX was presented within the context of a nightclub; a box filled with fog within a room filled with fog. 

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The audience witnessed entrapped fog, marking a clear volume of space in a way that evokes the negative-space cast works of artist Rachel Whiteread in pieces like Untitled Monument (2001), House (1993), or Ghost (1990). Her giant concrete casts of rooms, or even an entire house takes the interior volume of a space and externalises it. Concrete and fog may appear to be antheiss materials but in the context of  Whiteread's work these materials share a DNA indicative of volumes, of making air visible. 

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FOG BOX at Intonal Festival

Spring 2025 

 

In Spring 2025, we were invited to perform FOG BOX at Intonal Festival, Inkonst, Mälmo. With a micro-residency we were able to spend three days in a studio space and performed at the late night black box disco club. An extra box was added and Swedish dance artist  Sanna Blennow joined the team. 

 

We discovered that a human body inside the box holds a lot of impact: slow movements, still postures, time for the audience's gaze to adjust to the slow development of the work. FOG BOX performative installation again resonating so much with sculptural work.The impact of seeing a moving body in parts is significant, a hand on the see-through plastic is so clear but disappears from view so easily.  Mar and Sanna were exploring different unexpected body combinations - a foot appearing where a hand should be, a face where there was a foot.

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 It was also the first opportunity for Ryan and Mar to see the box from an outside context. A lava lamp came to Mar’s mind, as a material and visual reference to what we could do or become: - A body as a body of lava, to float and fall, to play with gravity and drop, to let oneself slide being of a viscous materiality. A game between densities that circulate up and down, like gentle elevators, like the air of different densities in a valley. 

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This landmark marks a continuation of the research but also a commitment to the future of the artistic project. Mar and Ryan will continue to enter discourses and play around the project. In recently presenting FOG BOX in Sweden and in writing and recording this article, they commit themselves to the fog, with many questions still arising from the mist. The future feels foggy.