Making and Knowing Art from the Heart

Riikka Theresa Innanen Video editing
Antti Nykyri Sound design
Leena Rouhiainen Movement, text and speech

Making and Knowing Art from the Heart was a collaborative performance lecture involving sound, speech, visual material and dance. By intermixing personal, physical, artistic exploration and theoretical insights we questioned how the heart knows.

The lecture was presented 28.2.2013 at CARPA 3 - The third Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts: The Impact of Performance as Research, University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy. You can find the full proceedings with my comments on sound design and knowing through the heart here.

Our lecture included a performance called Renderings of the Heart of Matter. It consisted of video and sound material as well as live dance. The original video image and sound material were recorded from a cardiogram of Leena Rouhiainen's heart on October 5, 2012 by senior physician Vesa Järvinen at Hyvinkää hospital, Finland. Later this material was processed, edited and composed by me and Riikka Theresa Innanen in order to create the audiovisual part of the piece. The story for choosing this material can be learned from Leena's comments in our presentation.

The audiovisual part of Renderings of the Heart of Matter can be listened and watched below.

The text spoken in the performance includes quotations from the following publications:

Ahmed, Sara 2010. ”Happy Objects.” In Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 29–51.

Darwin, Charles 2007/1899. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: Bibliobazaar.

Gibbs, Anna 2001. ”Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect.” Australian Humanities Review 24. http: //www.australianhumanitiesre- view.org/ (10.10.2012).

Irigaray, Luce 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Londone: The Athlone Press.

Lefebvre, Henri 1991/1974. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith. Malden USA, Oxford UK, Carlton Australia: Blackwell Publishing. 

Massumi, Brian 2002. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Nancy, Jean Luc 2008. Corpus. Trans. Richard A. Rand. Fordham University. Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1999. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Richard Commons. The Pennsylvania State University: Penn State Electronic Classics. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/nietsche/tszarath.pdf (18.2.2013).

Perec George 2008/1974. Spieces of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Classics.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine 2013/1971. The little prince. Trans. Richard Howard. China: Edmont Heritage.

Spinoza, Benedictus de 1923/1677. Ethics. Transl. R.H.M. Elwes. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza)/Part_3). (18.2.2013)