During this conference I’m conducting a series of live Air Reports: written sensory analyses of the air as I experience it in the moment, published at twitter.com/airtasting and airtasting.com. In this session I’ll discuss this project within the context of Air Tasting (my practice of studying and facilitating sensory experiences of the air) and my current work that focuses on the medical history of the air cure and climatic health spas as sites that elicit curative effects through establishing a therapeutic relationship with the local environment. Reinstituting the air cure treatment for the 21st century, the Kurhaus Alpenblick Air Tasting Menu records daily air degustations at a former Swiss alpine air cure sanatorium. The Menu is available to guests at the Hotel Alpenblick’s restaurant and can be seen here: https://airtasting.com/assets/kurhaus-alpenblick-air-tasting-menu.pdf 

Alex Grunenfelder is a Swiss Canadian artist. His work employs printed matter, performance, olfaction and informal pedagogy to explore the perception of space, landscape, and the air.  alexgrunenfelder.com 

What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?

The subject of the air has obviously gained a lot of cultural significance in light of our respiratory pandemic and the increasingly dire effects of climate change, but there is little attention to how people experience the air personally. My work advances direct sensory awareness of air in the everyday as an important embodied knowledge.

Internal Singing is a practice exploring a sensitized voice-body connections by vocalising on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries and self-administered touch that calms the body in states of over-stimulation. As it builds through breath, pleasure and circulation, it attempts to prise open a space where acute sensitivity can be valued as skill.

Cara Tolmie’s practice at large centres itself upon the voice, the body, the listener and the complex of subjective as well as socially determined links between the three. http://caratolmie.tumblr.com/

What is most urgent to you in your research right now?

Connecting to other voice-body practices in order to discover how we might share knowledge about voice-body connections, sensitive non-verbal communication, group vocal improvisation, technologies and contexts of the voice-body, radical vocal imaginaries, the politics of listening and how to situate this as an interdisciplinary discourse.

A performative film-lecture proposing the “slow bullet point” as an artistic and political tool. Playing between forms of the Diaristic, Poetic, and Academic, the artist will present research between the bullet point's various histories, institutional anti-racism initiatives, and textual cinema.

Charles de Agustin is an artist based in Brooklyn making films, performances, and texts. BFA Rutgers University (US), MFA University of Oxford (UK). charlesdeagustin.com

What is most urgent to you in your research right now?

Regarding issues of access and appropriation, I’m focused on defining a “new didacticism” in contemporary art/cinema through my practice. The logic of caricature—which “renders (media) highly readable but also places it on the edge of readability” (Eric Herhuth)—is a vital tool in this effort to support a didacticism that transcends its own limits.