EXPERIMENTS IN COMPANY is a project by Amy Cutler and Ella Finer, unfolding in several parts over a three-month residency at KELDER in Chapel Market. Building on KELDER’s commitment to alternative modes of display in an unconventional space in the market community, this project has a particular focus on the ways in which, under stressful climate conditions, we are ‘at stake in each other’s company’ (Thom van Dooren).
Over the course of the residency KELDER’s project space will be used to create new prototypes for sound work and cinema, developed from conversations between Ella’s work on ‘the wild life of sound’ – forms of acoustic commons which fall outside the official language of law, such as cetacean communications, or the political act of ‘keening’ – and Amy’s work on new assemblies of cinema which challenge the dominance of Homo Cinematicus, and normative acts of audience design: the arrayed chairs; the forward-facing eyes; the rectangular horizons.
Across the correspondences of their work, the artists will evolve audio-visual installations in the exhibition space, writing and creating towards and through each other’s practice, as well as bringing invited guests’ own experiments into the mix. Following Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of ‘shimmer’ as an ecology and process of encounter in which ‘different ways of being and doing find interesting things to do together’, the space will host several gatherings over the course of the residency.
Event 1: Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary (event link here)
Friday 30 September 2022
18:30–20:30 at KELDER, 26A Chapel Market, London N1 9EN
This is by invite only, but if you would like to join please email studio@kelderprojects.com
The first part of Ella Finer and Amy Cutler’s Experiments in Company titled, ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary’, is named after a technological article published in August 2022, heralding the moment at which rainwater everywhere on Earth became irreversibly unsafe to drink. This title will be taken as a departure point for ways of registering new anniversaries in the social experience of climate, outside of the bureaucratic centre: ways manifesting in the artists’ work to date through letters exchanged during record breaking heat waves and the creation of new cinematic almanacs for a climate undone.
For this first event we invite you to bring an experiment you are working on or have been working on, of any form, content, mood, direction. This may be something you feel corresponds with thinking of ‘new planetary boundaries’, or it may be something you have considered an experiment in your practice or your thinking that you would like to share. You are also very welcome to bring just yourself.
Info on future gatherings and stages of the exhibition:
Event 2: Planetary Vertigo (event link here)
Friday 28 October 2022
18:30–20:30 at KELDER, 26A Chapel Market, London N1 9EN
Projection (is) a territory of knowledge bound to atmosphere. - Giuliana Bruno, 2022
Developing from our connections through Marsquakes, uranium mining, unsafe rain and fireflies, the second Experiments in Company gathering and redesign will consider ‘new planetary boundaries’ through the environmentality of projection. After all, there is no longer any charmed circle from which a seated, immune audience can simply sit and watch – and listen to – the spectacle of climate malfunction unfold.
We will be exploring the felt senses and atmospheres of audiovisual projection, including forms of horizon (and anti-horizon), observatory (and anti-observatory), and the ‘vertiginous’ global which Tiago de Luca has proposed as the hallmark of the Anthropocene’s planetary cinematic consciousness. 3D glasses will be supplied as part of an experiment into perceived dimensions.
As well as the launch of the new installation prototype, we will meet and talk over drinks, and again encourage the sharing of reflections or experiments in your own practice, design and thinking with forms of atmosphere, perspective, changed bearings and climate’s vanishing points of crisis.
Event 3: The Year Without a Summer: A Night Writers’ Salon with Lucy Mercer and James Wilkes (event link here)
Friday 25th November 2022
19:00–23:00 at KELDER, 26A Chapel Market, London N1 9EN
This event is by invitation only, but if you would like to join please email studio@kelderprojects.com with a short description of your work and why you would like to be part of the event.
Experiments in Company hosts a night writers’ salon: a gathering for those who write into the night, whether for the love of what the night offers as a space of unknown possibilities, for the aesthetics and atmospherics of the night, or whether for necessity, because it is the only time we are alone with the illusion of endless time ahead of us. Taking its cue from the year without a summer – the phenomenal climactic event of 1816, a volcanic winter plunging temperatures worldwide – the evening will respond to the affective atmospherics of changing light. From the historic tephra infused sunsets of 1816 to our current experiences writing under polluted city skies – the stars obscured by what we have created – we will talk and work into the night, the space of the salon like our own dark sky preserve.
The audiovisual installation in KELDER’s project space will be redesigned again for this third stage of the residency, using the blackout space to explore the darkness-dependent design of cinema as a nocturnal ecological niche.
Event 4: Somewhere In the Universe, Two Black Holes Collide (event link here)
Friday 16th September 2022
18:30–20:30 at KELDER, 26A Chapel Market, London N1 9EN
Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide – as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows)…The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event. - Janna Levin, 2016.
Is a black hole the inverse of cinema? How do we sound the event we cannot see? Following Janna Levin’s work on black holes – and her expanding of observation as a practice of attunement, of deep listening to vibrational waves, in the absence of light – we close our experimental phases with a speculative black hole cinema.
This experiment combines Amy Cutler’s interests in how a black hole cinema might behave – drawing on recent descriptions of black holes as hiding ‘movies of the Universe in their glowing rings’ (radio astronomer, Michael Johnson) – with Ella’s work on sonorous tense, listening to elastic time, and proximities of touch, both cosmic and intimate.
As a provisional endpoint to Experiments in Company, this last phase will mark the meeting points of our audio-visual conversation so far. Inspired by terrestrial and extra-terrestrial environmental legacies, including deep futures of complete resource exhaustion, we consider how the shared trajectories of this KELDER project can intervene in the holding patterns of cinema and planetary thinking. From its first phantasmagoria, to what has been called the ‘pantheistic phosphorescence’ of earth cinema, to a black hole’s infinite nesting of images of the universe (an archive of sorts), we will explore what travels through light, sound, time and energy via the ‘collisions’ of collaborative practice.
