12 – 13.10.2023 Workshop 2
NOVELTELENOVELA @W139
NOVELTELENOVELA is a project that proposes the spontaneous generation of a television soap opera at W139 by Leslie Lawrence, Sophia Simensky and Andrea Lopez Bernal. It uses a a new system where dramatic scenes of a soap opera are filmed so rapidly in this durational performance that the actors must receive their dialogue through a small earpiece and immediately repeat them, as they do not have time to learn lines or repeat a take. Scripts for the performance are written by a large language model in AI based on ideas provided by invited artists and the exhibition audience, raising questions of what it means to be possessed by ideological forces and non-human entities at the onset of the age of information pollution. The presence of both the tv screen and the working set within the exhibition complicates the position of the audience whose critical stance is undermined by the intimacy of witnessing production.
The involvement in NOVELTELENOVELA immediately follows on from the Punctum Existentialum, Punctum Relativum, Punctum workshop, where the initial results of each participants individual practice is discussed with the NOVELTELENOVELA team in order to streamline or simplify their practices as persona’s ready, by neccessity, to be enacted in the NOVELTELENOVELA. The process is intended both as a way to liberate the individual from potentially unnecessary complications and as a gesture to ‘what if art was a mass media format and people actually liked it?’
Andrea López Bernal
Andrea López Bernal is a visual Artist based in Barcelona. In her work she explores the notion of authenticity in the various spheres of human experience, from love and friendship to work and political engagement. She does so by using a broad array of references and materials such as dental interventions, spirit stories and contemporary ritualistic practices. If needed she immerses herself into unusual and sometimes challenging situations to investigate phenomena through the body and combines these components to bitter sweet and surprising effect. Andrea is currently a research fellow of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut (2022-2023). In her research, she proposes for us humans to act art’ificially in order to form new paradigms of inner and collective being by using performance as a tool to get closer to ‘the state of the radical moment’. Andrea is interested in the in-between state, where the choreography meets reality where they fuse to create constructed situations. Andrea has shown her work at the Loop Festival, Barcelona (ES), Teatro San Materno, Ascona (CH). Combo Gallery, Venecia (IT), Bageion Hotel, Athens (GR) and has participated in Academiae Biennial 2018 in Fortezza (IT), Zentro Azkuna, Bilbao (ES), Galería Angels Barcelona (ES), La Capella, Barcelona (ES). “Soft Landings: Charity Gala” at De Appel Amsterdam (NL), among other venues.
Sophia Simensky
Sophia Simensky’s interdisciplinary artistic practice combines sculpture, moving image and writing to generate scenographic installations and creative non-fiction texts. Her writing often integrates fragments of appropriated or found material, drawing upon post-modern strategies and auto-fiction to veer on the speculative, imagined or absurd. Sophia’s sculptural and scenographic practice draws on vernacular crafts and material culture, to explore the relationship between material conditions and mode of with the circulation of ideas and endorsement of belief systems. As well as exhibiting her work internationally, Sophia was most recently resident at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop and has worked as a production designer on award-winning theatre, film and TV, including shows in the West End, New York and the Sheffield Crucible.
Leslie Lawrence
Leslie Lawrence’s practice aims to probe the outer limits of artistic philosophies as visions of a better future through the ongoing creation of their own ‘artist television show’ as a meta-narrative involving exaggerated characters and fantastical settings. This work involves ambitious co-operative projects informed by their research into the theory of group decision-making and the building of live ‘sites of production’ for the interwoven creation of individual and collective art. Leslie Lawrence’s films have been shown internationally including venues in New York, London, Moscow, Milan & Athens; as well as in institutions including MK&G Art and Design Museum Hamburg and the Centre National du Graphisme Chaumont.