I am happy to announce a new publication titled How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications (PDF of preprint), published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. The paper is based on the Sverm project, and was written and accepted two years ago. Sometimes academic publishing takes absurdly long, which this is an example of, but I am happy that the publication is finally out in the wild.

For the last couple of years I have been involved in an artistic research project called Sverm, in which we investigate the artistic potential of bodily micromovements and microsound. We are currently working towards a series of intimate lab performances in the end of November. As a side-project to the performances, we are also working with video artist Lavasir Nordrum, on the making of four short videos documenting the four main parts of the project: micromovement, microsound, excitation, resonance.

Victoria Johnson has posted a video of the performance of our piece Transformation on Youtube: The video is from Victoria’s final performance as part of her research fellowship in the arts(PhD-equivalent), which happened Monday 28 March 2011 at the Norwegian Academy of Music. As I wrote earlier this year: Transformation a piece where we are using video analysis to control sound selection and spatialisation. We have been developing the setup and piece during the last couple of years, and performed variations of the piece at MIC, the Opera house and at the music academy last year.

I have been delving into the world of what I have called micromovement recently. At first I did not think much about the word “micromovement” itself, assuming that this was a well-used word for small movements. But since several people have asked me about what I actually mean when talking about micromovements, I have had to think about the meaning of the word itself. There are two reasons why I think people get confused with the word micromovement: a) the meaning of the prefix “micro”, b) what the “micro” refers to.