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How To Exit a Reality: Cosmologies of Space, Attention and Spectatorship

A keynote lecture by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT

Artistic Research Day | Artistic Research and Imagination, Fontys Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg

21 January 2023, 12:30-14:00 hrs

In the session Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT will share some of the principles from their long term research under the umbrella name Spectra - Space Is an Organism, where they explore the relationship between attention and an embodied experience of space: how the (re)organisation of attention and space affects one’s sense of ‘reality’ and the modes of spectatorship emerging from it. How – when the logics of attention and space are altered – might a new ‘imaginal’ space appear in their overlap?

The session will focus on the overlaps of dream logic, escape room (gameplay) logic and deep-time cosmological logic behind their recent performance How To Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) and site-responsive audio-visual installation Looking-Glass House, both in collaboration with the moon.
The session will include practical exercises where the participants are invited to work with dream mapping and escape room principles to develop playful performative in-disciplinary or transdisiplinary setups.

 

We are happy to announce another installment of Spectra | Salons! Join us for an evening of an in-progress sharing of fragments from Within Cells Interlinked by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms plus conversations and drinks. An interdisciplinary evening exploring the overlaps between dream, gameplay and performance, how they guide and inform us in our waking lives and what agency they lend us.

At TILT | Studio, Marci Panis, Marcusstraat 52 | 1D, Amsterdam

10 May 2024, 18.00 hrs

Spectra | Salons are in-disciplinary art evenings across performance and visual art that explore the questions of spectatorship, imagination and spectacle and how they are intertwined, embodied and felt in the era of globalism and digitalisation. Hosted by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in the TILT studio and the Salon of Marci Panis, Amsterdam, the Spectra | Salons feature a series of in-progress sharing sessions, experiments and conversations which follow our and our guests current artistic research processes and questions.

Produced by TILT. Spectra | Salons are made possible by the financial contribution of the Gemeente Amsterdam / Stadsdeel Oost. TILT receives structural subsidy from the Amsterdam Fund for the Art for the period 2021-2024. Supported by Marci Panis.

We are happy to announce the premiere of the new performance Within Cells Interlinked by Andrea Božić and Julia willms at the SPRING Performing Arts Festival Utrecht and performances at Frascati, Amsterdam

Premiere: 29-30 May 2024, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Het Huis, Utrecht
Performances: 4-5 June 2024, Frascati, Amsterdam

 

Within Cells Interlinked is a transmedia performance interconnecting multiple worlds with the logic of dreams, corporate surveillance and gameplay. Several performers interact with several versions of themselves across different realities. A time-traveling groomsman at a bombed wedding, a toddler that changes gender and runs on battery and dream analysts intervening in citizens’ night time reveries in an attempt to affect future events. All these different worlds co-exist on stage simultaneously in a seamless and intertwined labyrinth of physical, virtual and imaginary spaces. The characters are initially not aware of each other but their actions impact each others’. They intervene in each others’ realities, creating the world(s) – changing and interlinking them - as they discover them.

This transmedia performance playfully explores the questions of free will and agency, sentience and imagination amidst the next wave of digitalization and globalization. Overlapping dream and gameplay, science and mysticism, it inquires how–when these other logics are transposed and projected onto the everyday–this can allow for other perceptions and imaginaries to emerge.

Within Cells Interlinked is a collaboration with the Premonitions Agency, a specu-fictional government agency whose aim is to collect, capture and analyze citizens’ dreams and intervene into them to affect possible futures.  The performance is based on real nighttime dreams, donated by the artistic team and several other dreamers. TILT also hosts the Premonitions Agency Dream Collecting and Analysis sessions where the audience can contribute their dreams to this research.

Within Cells Interlinked is part of a performative cinematic multiverse titled LUNARIS, a fictional shared world - embedded in the ‘real’ world – which will host a constellation of interlinked works that will be created over the coming years: performances, audio-visual installations and related smaller works across performance and visual art.

Watch the teaser

Tickets at SPRING

Tickets at Frascati

 

Credits:

Concept, choreography, space, video and audio-visual design, direction: Andrea Božić and Julia Willms

Concept and performance development in collaboration with: Billy Mullaney

Performers: Andrea Božić, Billy Mullaney, Julia Willms, and Veronika Abdul-Visocka

Video animation: Julia Willms

Light design: Pablo Fontdevila

Technique: Simchah Hoed and Pablo Fontdevila

Production: Lena Meijer

Publicity: Hans Klijn

Dreams donated by the artistic team and various dreamers

Produced by TILT in co-production with SPRING Performing Arts Festival, in collaboration with the Premonitions Agency. Made possible by the financial contribution of the Dutch Performing Arts Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Art (structural support 2021-2024), BNG Fund, Tijl Fund. Research supported by DAS Theatre and iDLab / ATD

 

We are happy to annouce two installations by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT at Cinedans Fest, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

Opening: 20 MARCH | 18:00 - 22:00 | Foyer Cinema 1, Eye Filmmuseum
Exhibition: 21 - 24 MARCH | 11:00 - 22:00 | Foyer Cinema 1, Eye Filmmuseum

Civil Twilight - Choreography for 450 nm and 600 nm
Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT
Video-light installation
Video projection, light, mirror floor
14 min loop
2022

 

The video-light installation Civil Twilight - Choreography for 450 nm and 600 nm works with the palette of the night sky colours, a deep indigo-violet-blue and deep orange-red ranges, the shortest and longest wavelengths visible to human eye. It features a cube-like shape in constant movement that plays with the perception of colour and shape. It combines infrathin layers of colour light projected across several surfaces, creating a perceptual continuum between a 2D video image and 3D projection screens, the shape constantly affected by a flux of merging colour fields. Civil Twilight plays on the concept that color does not exist by itself but emerges in an interplay between the light, the surface and the perceving eye.

More information about the installation here

More information about the festival here

 

Through the Looking Glasses
Andrea Božić, Robert Pravda, Julia Willms | TILT
Audio-visual installation
Several persons installation, white glasses, light, sound,
4 min loop
2022

Through the Looking Glasses is an audio-visual installation based on the Ganzfeld effect, a sensory immersion within the space of colour and sound. The eye sees no recognizable spatial border or shape but a uniform colour field. The ear hears no recognizable sound related to the outside space but a continuous noise wave. ‘Looking outside’ becomes ‘looking inside’. The visitor is taken to ‘no space’: an intimate sensory immersion environment and an inverted cinema.

More information about the installation here

More information about the festival here

An interdisciplinary evening exploring the overlaps between dream, gameplay, theatre and performance, how they guide and inform us in our waking lives and what agency they lend us. With input and a conversation with guests: Mala Kline (choreographer, writer, certified practitioner and teacher of Saphire™ imagery and dream work) and Marijn Lems (theatre and game critic); and the first in-progress sharing of The Premonitions Bureau #1 by Billy Mullaney and The Premonitions Agency Dream Movement Capturing Session (research sharing) by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms plus end of the year get together and drinks.

 

At TILT | Studio, Marci Panis, Marcusstraat 52 | 1D, Amsterdam
Friday, 15 December 2023 at 19.00 – 23.00 hrs
Entrance free. Donations welcome.

 

Spectra | Salons are in-disciplinary art evenings across performance and visual art that explore the questions of spectatorship, imagination and spectacle and how they are intertwined, embodied and felt in the era of globalism and digitalisation. Hosted by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in the TILT studio and the Salon of Marci Panis, Amsterdam, the Spectra | Salons feature a series of in-progress sharing sessions, experiments and conversations which follow our and our guests current artistic research processes and questions.

The Premonitions Bureau #1 (in-progress)
By Billy Mullaney

The very first issue! Weird tales and spooky stories ripped straight from the arcane files of the Premonitions Bureau itself! Intrigue! Betrayal! A pair of dream detectives flung beyond the reaches of time and space! Occult mystery and hair-raising suspense! Their first adventure! Will they save the day? At what cost??

(The Premonitions Bureau #1 is a narrative experiment towards a theatre/comic book hybrid)

The Premonitions Agency Dream Movement Capturing Session (research sharing)
Presented by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in collaboration with the Premonitions Agency

Have you ever wondered about the untapped potential of your dreams?

Welcome to the very first test version of The Premonitions Agency Dream Movement Capturing Session. This experimental government agency initiative aims to collect citizens' dreams and analyze them to predict and affeect real-life events and possible futuer scenarios. We are excited to collaborate with the Premonitions Agency as part of the research for our new performance Within Cells Interlinked. In this Salon, we are sharing the first research of our dream movement capturing method.

 

Produced by TILT. Spectra | Salons are made possible by the financial contribution of the Gemeente Amsterdam / Stadsdeel Oost. TILT receives structural subsidy from the Amsterdam Fund for the Art for the period 2021-2024. Supported by Marci Panis.
 
Follow our website and social media for the dates of the other Spectra | Salons and programme updates:
http://www.tilt.zone/node/59
https://www.facebook.com/TiltIndisciplinaryArtPlatform
https://www.instagram.com/tilt.zone/
 
www.willmsworks.net    www.andreabozic.com www.billymullaney.com

We are very happy to announce audio-visual Zandloper [Hourglass] by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms is part of the group exhibition Sand - Resource, Life, Longing at Museum Sinclair Haus in Bad Homburg, Germany.

Opening Sunday 24 September 2023, 12 hrs

Exhibition 24 September 2023 - 11 February 2024

Glass is made of sand. Glass is hard enough to protect us but it shatters with incredible ease.  It is made from opaque sand, yet it is completely transparent.  It behaves like a solid material but it is also a liquid in disguise.

 

Zandloper [Hourglass] is an audio-visual installation as an interface that plays on the visitor’s gaze towards the space and the environment they are in, featuring sand as a central player. The installation creates a membrane between the cinematic and the physical space where the edges of the work extend – potentially indefinitely. Zandloper [Hourglass] features a mesmerizing cycle of exploitation, co-dependency, opportunism, fantasy, dream, fiction and habitual reality.

More information about the work here

About the exhibition:

The exhibition Sand - Resource, Life, Longing is dedicated to sand as an indispensable raw material, a material that is all too often banalized, and shows its diversity and its emotional and material significance for our society. It shows the sedimentary rock in its different structures, qualities and dimensions. The exhibition zooms in from the large, poetic expanses of the sandy landscapes to the microscopic components, making facets visible that are not visible to the human eye at first glance.

With works by: Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Ole Bielfeldt, Ferhat Bouda, Edward Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky, Jochem Hendricks, Irenaeus Herok, Laurent Mareschal, Vik Muniz, Jenny Natusch, Jacques Pugin, Sim Chi Yin, Micha Ullman, Julia Willms & Andrea Božić, Stefanie Zoche

More information about the exhibition here

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Museum Sinclair Haus
Löwengasse 15
61348 Bad Homburg v.d.H.
Germany

Opening times: Tue–Fri 14-19 hrs

 

We are happy to announce Spectra | Salons are back! Join us for the upcoming series of evenings:

Spectra | Salons are in-disciplinary art evenings across performance and visual art that explore the questions of spectatorship, imagination and spectacle and how they are intertwined, embodied and felt in the era of globalism and digitalisation. Hosted by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in the TILT studio and the Salon of Marci Panis, Amsterdam from September to December, the Spectra | Salons 2023 feature a series of in-progress sharing sessions, experiments and conversations which follow our and our guests current artistic research processes and questions.

Spectra | Salon: Erotic Fan Fiction, Dreams and Premonitions Agency

An evening of the first in-progress versions of The Premonitions Agency Dream Collecting Session (test version) by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms and Harry Potter and the Delicious Brunch (in-progress) by Billy Mullaney plus conversations and drinks.

Saturday, 16 September 2023 at 19.00 – 23.00 hrs
TILT | Studio, Marci Panis, Marcusstraat 52 | 1D, Amsterdam

The Premonitions Agency Dream Collecting Station (test version) presented by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms in collaboration with the Premonitions Agency

Have you ever wondered about the untapped potential of your dreams?

Welcome to the very first test version of The Premonitions Agency Dream Collecting Station. This experimental government agency initiative aims to collect citizens' dreams and analyze them to predict possible future scenarios. We are excited to collaborate with the Premonitions Agency as part of the research for our new performance, "Within Cells Interlinked."

How it works:

Your dreams are a treasure trove of untapped creativity, and we are here to uncover their mysteries.

1.     Volunteer Participation: Participation is entirely voluntary.

2.     Public or (Semi) Private Sessions: You can decide whether you want your dream collection session to be public or (semi)private.

3.     Specially Designed Questions and Instructions: You will be guided through a set of specially designed questions and instructions to help recall, embody and describe your dream in as much detail as possible. This process aids in the accurate recording and interpretation of dreams.

4.     Session Recording and Drawings: Each dream collection session will be meticulously recorded and drawings will be made preserving the essence of your nocturnal adventures.

5.     Data Storage and Analysis: The dreams and drawings collected will be stored securely within the Premonitions Agency's archive. Our team of experts will analyze your dreams to identify patterns, recurring themes, and possible future scenarios.

The Premonitions Agency Dream Collecting Station seeks to explore the potential of dreams in predicting future scenarios. Your participation is crucial to our research and we assure you that your data will be handled with the utmost care and confidentiality. Thank you for being part of this groundbreaking experiment.


 
Harry Potter and the Delicious Brunch (in-progress) by Billy Mullaney

Billy has recently been researching erotic Harry Potter fan fiction as the absolute lowest contemporary literary form.
He is curious about the communities that have sprung up around generating and sharing such texts, the mode of address with which they are written, and what might be "read" beyond the stories themselves. He is particularly interested in the use of fan fiction as personal fantasy fulfillment (using the protagonist as a stand-in for themselves and often having nothing to do with the source material), and how these stories can become indeed more legible as portraits of the author. Harry Potter and the Delicious Brunch is a short in-progress sketch exploring such a spectacle of self-indulgence, and which *might* develop into a performance in the future(!)

 
Entrance free. Donations welcome.
How to get there: http://marcipanis.nl/wordpress/contact
 
Produced by TILT. Spectra | Salons are made possible by the financial contribution of the Gemeente Amsterdam / Stadsdeel Oost. TILT receives structural subsidy from the Amsterdam Fund for the Art for the period 2021-2024. Supported by Marci Panis.
 
Follow our website and social media for the dates of the other Spectra | Salons this fall:

www.tilt.zone
https://www.facebook.com/TiltIndisciplinaryArtPlatform
https://www.instagram.com/tilt.zone/
 
www.willmsworks.net    www.andreabozic.com www.billymullaney.com

 

 
 

 

 

We are very excited to announce the premiere of The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney, associate artist at TILT, at Veem House for Performance on 1 April 2022.

Try out: 31 March 2022 - 20.00 hrs
Premiere: 1 April 2022 - 20.00 hrs
2 April 2022, 20.00 hrs

Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam

The Glory Machine is a theatre performance consisting of filming and editing a promotional trailer for the performance itself. The audience observes the rapid-fire setup and recording of eighty microscenes, which are simultaneously edited and arranged live by an editor into a short trailer video. The piece was inspired by the ways in which we curate and perform idealized versions of ourselves online through social media platforms and beyond. By privileging the development of web presence over the performance itself, The Glory Machine archly proposes an all-in investment into "cultural capital, responding to (by playing along with) the labor obligatorily required to generate online presence and social media outreach. Conceived as a virus, The Glory Machine follows social media logic, producing its own promotional material to reproduce itself indefinitely.

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

- Jorge Luis Borges, introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths

In the press:

"The attention economy is eroding and taking over politics, the media and other departments of the public domain from within. The Glory Machine offers no real resistance or a solution. It very lovingly puts its finger on the sore spot. Well worth it." Theaterkrant Critic's Pick, read the review HERE

Best new text/choreography/libretto of 2022 - Fransien van der Putt - Theaterkrant

Since 2021, Billy Mullaney is an associated artist at TILT. He performs in How to Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) and TILT produces his new work The Glory Machine, in co-production with the Veem House for Performance and Productiehuis Theater Rotterdam.
 

 

The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney | TILT at Het Het Huis x Kikker and Frascati:

14 April, 20.00, Het Huis Utrecht (Het Huis x Kikker), Utrecht, The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney
25-26 April, 20.00, Frascati, Amsterdam, The Glory Machine by Billy Mullaney

 

How To Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) goes to Oerol Festival, Terschelling!
9-18 June 2023

We are very happy to announce How To Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) our performance in collaboration with the moon at Oerol Festival on Terschelling! We are making a special outdoors version at the Bostheater. The performance is based on the Metonic score: a cycle where the Moon returns to exactly the same place in the night sky and against the same backdrop of the stars every 19 years.

Especially for the performances at Oerol, we have prepared the exact same night sky as it was in 1605, the year witch-hunt ended in the Netherlands and the year 2061, the year of the fist human settlement on the moon.

For the performance, we have collected night-time dreams, memories, scientific models, moon rituals and SF fiction, all relating to the moon, spanning from the distant past to the deep-time future. The two performers take the audience on a journey through these different realities merging them with the architectural space of the theatre, so they all take place at the same time here and now.

How To Exit a Reality (Attempt 1 of 19) is a performance based on the escape room principle: we are looking for an exit but every time we find one, we end up in another reality. The two performers apply dream logic and gameplay to the world, approaching it as an existential virtual game – one that we can navigate, change, shift and play, or attempt to exit its logic. Every exit we take brings us to yet another reality – until even the space here and now becomes yet another fluid fiction.

Tickets

Friday 09 June: 21:00 hrs
Saturday 10 June: 15:00 and 21:00 hrs
Sunday 11 June: 15:00 and 21:00 hrs
Monday 12 June: 21:00 hrs
Tuesday - rest day
Wednesday 14 June: 21:00 hrs
Thursday 15 June: 15:00 and 21:00 hrs
Friday 16 June: 15:00 and 21:00 hrs
Saturday 17 June: 15:00 and 21:00 hrs
Sunday 18 June: 15:00 hrs

In the press:

Critic's Pick, Theaterkrant: 'With How To Exit A Reality (Attempt 1 of 19), Andrea Božić and Julia Willms manage to contemplate on the concept of reality in a fascinating, alienating and meditative way. In doing so, they showcase the power of theater and imagination, ending with a pun: how can you escape the theatre?'