In English: The Flight of the Sea Swallow

By Stef – Translation by Felipe
A sea swallow flies and sits on my shoulder. She whispers something in my ear – in an unknown language. After all, as my eyes were opened, I sat in front of my keyboard. With this daydream my thoughts lighted the last event that I attended at the Black Hole Factory. „The flight of the sea swallow“ is not only part of my mysterious dream, but a terrific live performance project that kidnapped me and took me to a magic and philosophical sphere full of ideas about time and space. A moment later, my fingers started to type my ideas through the keyword. A text is just created on the computer screen and at that point, a new report for Kult-Tour was born. Braunschweig, Sydney and New York merged into the Black Hole Factory in a timeless art piece, which took place on the 24th and 25th of January and is now about to be brought back from the past through the present of my writing. And the Sea Swallow will fly again the 25th and 26th of April 2014. I am looking forward to visit this real dreams factory again.

Fotos: Jens Bartels | Evolution Error

Saturday, the 25th of January, we had one of the coldest days of this winter. It was just as if the world had stopped the heartbeat to open the possibility of completely unfolding the dynamics of a trans-time and spatial art idea. The outer world was numb and a clinking wind brought dry snowdrifts to the cold black streets of Brunswick, as I made myself on the way to the “Flight of the sea swallow“ in the Blackhole Factory. It was already dark. I chose the performance at 9pm to be allowed to go to the bottom part, as promised in the announcement of the event. I didn’t really know what I was expecting to experience. I had to immerse myself deeply under the artistic mill of the Blackhole Factory where the Ateliers of the international artistic community led by Elke Utermöhlen, Slawig Martin and Martin Kroll are hidden. Once at the inside, I felt how my fingertips thawed painfully under the skin. The warm inside pushed out of the door, gently but decidedly, the cold atmosphere of the city. The cold reality of the exterior must give up against this particular art experience. Everything is ready for the „Flight of the Sea Swallow“, a live multimedia performance of audio, photo and video elements in a large, dark and crowed room of the Blackhole Factory equipped with diverse technological projection screens and non traditional music instruments, is about to start.  Lighting beams in cool blue tones, warmed by purple and red shades, contoured the room and illuminated three characters on the bare stone floor. There were the three initials of the cities that the “The flight of the sea swallow” linked to each other. Along with the artistic group “Blackhole Factory”, this live performance is produced by the New Yorker Marc Sloan and Roger Mills from Sydney. In this context, they interact with each other and communicate during the performance via an internet connection. The color of the spotlights indicates the respective temperatures that exist at that moment in Braunschweig, New York and Sydney, as someone explained to me later on. In Braunschweig, it was apparently the coldest – as noticed through the ice-blue light of the spotlight.
As guests and from a public tribune, me and the new Kult-Tour contributor Jens Bartels made a photographic documentary of the show. From the bleak solitude of our seats I engaged instantly with the dominant, vibrant stillness of the place and the unreal light pulses coming from the projections and the headlights. At that moment, the last show of this 24 hours performance was unfortunately visited by only a few people, which made the moment even more special and unreal. Later, as the door closed behind the last person and the first abstract tone from the speaker appeared, I knew that all of those who decided to watch the performance through the live stream session were going to miss something. The atmosphere was simply magic! It’s hard to describe with words what just happened. What was there “to be seen”, has been already described by Matthias Bosenick from Krautnick. He had attended the premier and the setting was exactly the same as in the day I attended the show.
„A stage with two big screens, two balloons in the middle, three balloons left, a table with equipment and a lounge chair on the left, a table with equipment and three lights on the right. Left at the table is Elke Utermöhlen, at the right Slawig Martin, Martin Kroll is controlling the video and transmission technology. On the left balloon you can see a projection of Marc Sloan, who is working with guitar, electronics and percussion instruments, on the right you will experience Roger Mills, who from Sydney contributes with some unknown instruments. Elke Utermöhlen sings and edits her voice while doing it.“
It is this voice what guides the current performance, which, however, differs from the previous ones, due to the absence of a rigid sequence. The ‚Flight of the sea swallow” is a conglomerate of dynamically changing video and photo elements entangling at different sound levels , atmospheric lighting effects and live music. The central point of the actions is the artists navigating through this variable visual and acoustic world and also improvising their live actions. Both Martin Slawig and Roger Miils, as well as Marc Sloan are wearing a sensor on one hand connected to the multi-media perfromance and flying, in a metaphorical sense, in a journey throughout this artistically contextualized world of images and sounds, entitled „The flight of Sea Swallow“. Through the movements of their hands, they navigate through a globe with longitudinal and latitudinal circles that are shown on the left side of the screen.
The game is expanded by the perception of the audience, which is made part of this unique moment while the performance plays with the association and feelings of the spectator, who is sometimes not sure of the origin of the different aesthetic levels. Sometimes Elke sits on the orange chair that acts as an intellectual center of the performance and explains in English and German, what is happening during the performance. In addition, she makes visual and verbal contact with Marc Soan and Roger Mills via webcam.
One cannot understand immediately, what happens during the performance. What is live motion, what is a taken picture and an recorded soundtrack? What is impregnated from the present and what from the past? One must get involved in this unexplainable game: watch at it, listen to it and feel it. Also physically one can feel the presence of the whole action because the sounds are sometimes so darkly sonorous and low tone-distorted that behind me a shelf in a dark wall of the room begins to vibrate. I feel easily the trembling in the seat. Surround, body and spirit are vibrating in harmony of with the artwork. At the end, I perceive myself and my physical and spiritual existence in a similar transformative state, while on the two big screens, the projections in the center of the stage catch the attention. The video sequences alternate with voice recordings and photographs, but there are no clear boundaries or transitions.
Martin Slawing plays also music, but his instruments are an unusual art with movements almost like to meditate controlling the buttons and improvising with the mixer, generating feedback sounds that dissolve within the general sound mix of the performance. All these components made “The flight of the seaswallow” an organic and realistic art piece from the field of media –art.
I am excited and want to learn more! Curious, go to look for Martin Slawig after the performance. He was exhausted but happy. I can completely understand: he has probably slept only a few hours. In 5 hours session, the performance was presented in Braunschweig. But the “Flight of the Sea Swallow” had to be presented also in Sydney and New York during a whole day, independently from the time zones. In such a way, the show combines different conditions of places and times. The artificial world of performing from the artist connected to the art piece through a dynamic process that followed its own rules of time and space. Together they traced a time and space-neutralized flying route all over the world, restrained and counteracted by the artificial concept of the border of space and time and ultimately reflect “the development of a global orientation and therefore a changing cultural identity”. What a big opportunity for the public in Braunschweig to experiment the time and space gaps through “the fly of the Sea Swallow”.
This visit to the Black hole factory was definitively touching. I lost myself in happy memories and dreams on the Sea Swallow. But I just had to come back to the reality, and there it is, cold and windy.

At the Black hole factory the Sea Swallow will fly again the 25th and 26th of April 2014. I am looking forward to visit this real dreams factory again.