In nocturnal darkness, our sense of direction is challenged in many ways. What may be clear and familiar during the day blurs in the diffuse shadows of night. Our body increasingly resorts to sensory perceptions such as sounds and smells in an attempt to steer us through this thicket of uncertainty. This experience of destabilization is the departure point for Alice Slyngstad’s latest work Flare demure. Commissioned by Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Flare demure is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Scattered in the darkened Kunstraum, luminous bodies rise into the air like oversized flowers, bidding us orientation, only to expose themselves as fickle wayposts with their nervous flickering. And the sound emanating from them, perhaps a confidential voice, does little to aid our navigation, but rather hints that we are unsuspecting actors in a theatrical staging. A mise-en-scène that seems to have a script, but one that we have not been let in on. Who can we trust here? Who can we entrust ourselves and our bodies to?

Questions that Slyngstad does not resolve. On the contrary. Flare demure centers on how we experience and cope with ambiguity, how we surrender to the uncertain and mysterious. For Slyngstad, this experience has a close connection to the practice of cruising. Cruising as a balancing act between visibility and invisibility, self-concealment and exposure, but above all: as an invitation to pursue one’s own orientations.

When and where encounters between bodies actually occur in Flare demure, however, and whether we get to see each other and how much, yet depends largely on an algorithm developed especially for the exhibition. The digital infrastructure of the show, which materializes in an interplay of light and sound, is built upon a pre-programmed sequence that steers the visitors in the space. Or so it seems. The artist in fact constantly disrupts a full sense of orientation in space…

Flare demure continually throws us back to our own sensory apparatus, prompting us to search for personal forms of navigation. And so, the show is ultimately an invitation to face up to our losses of orientation and to try to navigate in new ways. As such, Flare demure constructs a heterotopia, a counterworld of sorts to our everyday reality.

Duration of audio score: 21:28
Writing, audio score, light: Alice Slyngstad
Technical designer and coder: Colin Eccleston

With the kind support of OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo

In Alice Slyngstad’s Soothing Pants, intimacy appears as fragments: profile lines, half-sent messages, algorithmic phrases drifting between desire and automation. The work examines digital dating as an infrastructure for distributing intimacy, where closeness is coded, filtered and endlessly deferred. Voices circulate without bodies, producing a digital space where connection feels mediated, transactional and, at times, quietly violent — particularly for queer and non-normative bodies.

The audio-visual installation Soothing Pants by Alice Slyngstad, which you hear, see and feel in Vleeshal, is based on the interaction with digital dating environments. Slyngstad refers to these spaces as infrastructures for distributing intimacy. The built-in coded language and the operation through algorithms have altered the way we communicate with one another in our search for (dis)connection. These systems have become a dominant mode of interaction in our urge for newness. They are defined by the cold operations of corporate endeavours.

Working with the language used on dating apps, Slyngstad’s practice deals with the ongoing contemporary process in which the corporal is becoming corporate. Communication between its users has become so automated that it can be seen as a form of algorithmic writing (‘hi what’s up, hi what’s up, hi what’s up, good u good u good u’). The handling of dating app profiles has become more and more like a mechanical act. With every swipe another person is unboxed: displaying their social status, class and gender identity through cryptic phrasing and quotations fuelled with irony and practical concerns (‘what kind of coffee’). Through being trained in mining human beings, we’re reducing them to their lifestyle choices and geolocation (‘less than three km away’). Like this, we’re building a mental map of entities of the city through online interactions.

In these digital environments we exist through language, exaggerating our fantasies and fictions. But how does one navigate through these rigid dating structures, when identifying outside of gender binaries or sexual norms? And beyond the algorithm? How can these corporate entities predict one’s preference, when we deal with fluid and complex existences? Or more broadly; where is the space for queer desire in a society built upon fixed structures?

For their installation in Vleeshal, Slyngstad took text fragments from profiles they found and chats they were engaged in. Slyngstad projected them on electrochromic glass panels resembling folding screens. Through this visual analogy, Slyngstad stretches the operations of the digital environment to communal fitting rooms, in which clients are forced to show themselves outside of their secluded booth, where the mirror is hanging and where the salesperson is ready to close the deal. These structures are not in place to comfort, Instead, they thrive on insecurity and can even be inherently violent for people not fitting the norm.

Algorithms of dating apps, by extension, are not built to meet somebody you like but will make you feel endlessly trapped in a humid waiting room. Thus we soothe ourselves and pant.

In the present, intimacy seems to be under pressure, and bodily desires are mediated in the digital sphere more than ever. Alice Slyngstad contemplates and confuses the confined structures of intimacy currently in place – an undertaking we can all benefit from.

Alice takes the handle as a point of departure, a handle to hold on to. In the main room, six enlarged handles form a ring, evoking a series of portals that seem to open onto a pond. The water element appeals to a sense of fluid identity, but the flow here is controlled, timed by the interplay of the arches, light, and sound.

The score (16.02mins loop) emerges from a collection of writings, conceived specifically for the installation and shaped by different sentiments. Through choral and liturgical elements, the affective qualities of the voice bring a performative dimension that touches upon Alice’s way of composing—singing through writing and writing through singing.

In a separate room, inside a heavy bag, the figure of a seahorse rests—dormant, yet symbolizing a living element with the capacity to give birth. The bag’s handles lie still and rigid, perhaps alluding to the handles of emotional baggage while the figure is tended by a voice, a fluid element meant to soften the solid quality of this inert composition.

Technical designer, programming and assembly: Colin Eccleston
Assembly help: Lisa Asplund
Second vocal: Jussi Andersson
Thanks to: Nynorskens Hus, Fellesverkstedet

Supported by: Kulturdirektoratet, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond

The writing-based installation Goodie bags takes you into the material-technical and emotional journey of identity shopping, while reflecting around a constant negotiation of norms. Through social cultures filled with projecting and mirroring, we’re fitting in, “passing”, being noticed and disappearing at the same time. What is the bodily and psychological labour involved in integration and integrating, normalizing and normalization?

In theory, a beam of light reflected between two parallel mirrors will be trapped for eternity, obliged to bounce back and forth repeatedly, ceaselessly, every lap between the two surfaces lengthening by the distance previously traveled, as the mirrored light recedes farther and farther into time. The visual effect for a person poised between the mirrors will be that of standing at the center of a tunnel of clones proceeding to the ends of visibility in two, opposite directions. Paradise for some, a nightmare, perhaps, for others. In either case, an infinite illustration of perfect normativity, visually analogous to the proverbial “echo chamber” that has become the medium and the symptom and the watchword of the self-referentially self-preferentially tripwired and autoreplicating reptilian brain embedded in the core of the hyper-networked social body. Select your candidate from the following two options. Check here to verify you're not a robot. Click submit to complete your order. Thank you for your feedback. You are receiving this system-generated email because you are a valued customer. Please do not respond.

Videoset / performers: Tao Yang, Eve Boontje, Hanne Johne
Typesetting: Anna Bierler

Thanks to Angie Keefer, Helena Keskküla, Tatiana Lozano, Jussi Andersson
Supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Norske Billedkunstnere