Fognemenology:
Feeling Fog From Within
FOG
Spring 2022
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This performance-based research is about fog. The materiality of fog. The phenomenological experience of fog. The power of the fog and its potential to make things disappear. It makes 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 and fog is the main character of this experiential exploration.
And just like fog, this research is hard to pin down. So sometimes these sentences might drift, might float, might linger. Audio vocal clips from an interview between Mar and Ryan , ryan and mar slip into sentences with an invitation to listen, to read and let the mind wander and wonder.
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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.
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 emerged.
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From Ambivalence
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.
It makes the air visible, light beams appear solid in space, while also making 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. It’s uncontrollable. It moves, it comes and goes. You want to move your head to the side in order to see but fog is taking over, you want to sharpen your hearing but fog is interrupting, disrupting, 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 (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 as Ryan’s final project.
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Artificial fog produced by a hazer and a smoke machine. The ethereal material displayed inside of the theatre fascinated us and again, we became interested in the phenomenological power of the material. The immersiveness was always an essential point, really at the core of our practices. Being immersed, giving the possibility for immersion, allowing people to immerse. Feeling it on our skins, covering front, back, side, side, up, 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. Ryan had encountered Olafur Ellison’s immersive fog piece: ‘you’re blind passenger’ where people are invited to walk down a corridor filled with fog. The phenomenological immersiveness of Ellison’s work was a key reference for UYOA, channeling the immersion into a seated theatre setting.
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We personified the smoke machines that were creating the fog; a hazer called Pam and a smoke machine called Sharon. They were fellow performers, the fog was also a character. Keeping fog as a performative partner was at the core of our practices, as well. 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.
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
2022 - ongoing
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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 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. Nightclubbing scenarios became an evident inspiration and crucial landmark for our work and this was also expressed in Ummm Yeah Okay And? Creating a dramaturgical conduit between three different environments: nature, theatre and club.
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UMMM YEAH OKAY AND? BOOK
Spring-Summer 2023
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 off a different paragraph or an image spliced into two would take on new meanings when mixed.
The research into materiality was particularly present in the book, 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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There has to be an object, a solid thing or conception, a clear expectation, in order for the fog to cover and distort our perception. The church needs to be there in order for the fog to shroud it, to make it disappear.
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UYOA at DeSchool Nightclub
Autumn 2023
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 the 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 think about fog 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.
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.
Next was a commision by Amsterdam collective YPNOTICA to make a performative installation at a nightclub addressing fog. FOG BOX was born from a project Ryan made back 10 years ago where he filled a see-through perspex box with smoke. (it appears he’s long been obsessed with fog).
A new box was built. The size of a shower cubicle with one performer inside. The fog slowly released inside the box and the performer disappeared into the dense fog, contained within the see-through box. Floating movements echoed the drifting fog, opposing the rhythmic 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.
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. The audience witnessed entrapped fog, marking a clear volume of space in a way that evokes the negative-space cast works of artist Racheal Whiteread in works like Untitled monument, House, or Ghost.