"Dead reckoning" is a form of navigation that determines the position of a craft by advancing a previous position to a new one on the basis of assumed distance and direction moved. The parameters of dead reckoning are direction of motion and distance traveled.

This film explores intimacy in the context of Svalbard through correspondence with three individuals, all of which are Norwegian men, to understand masculine identity in this place, in the manner of their three narratives: the one who grew up there and is constantly leaving; the one who comes in and out every two weeks to work and then return "home"; and the one who has always longed to go but can never arrive. Each holds a separate engagement with Svalbard and reveals information about how they are connected—why one keeps leaving, why one continually comes and goes and why one has never made it despite an incredible longing to be there. All three men each have a personal connection to one of the three main industries in Svalbard: mining, polar research and tourism. Concurrently, each is an artist.

A collaboration with Control Group and Myra Moreta at Packing House Center for the Arts

Mutability as a process of matter has the capability of merging the dialogue of two mutually exclusive entities with one another. In this particular scenario, the physical architecture of a dance studio and choreography of the body endeavor to take hold of one another, in effect, mutating as a separate third entity. The design of the space shifts the circulation to the exterior periphery and inbetween pods establishing three safety zones where viewer/participants can disappear and reappear engaging or observing with dancers. The pods are penetrable--a grid work of translucent fabric offers exchange between outside and inside disorienting the perception of interior/exterior. This installation/performance/soundscape turned viewers participatory as dancers moved them into uncomfortable situations. The circulation spaces offered no escapes.

Nyotaimori, a performance with Sinae Lee

Models: Kelley Kavanaugh and Sascha von Reckers

Photographs by Will Dunn

How should we eat, serve, present, and prepare food? How does tradition and culture influence our views on food? This performance examines the role of food in our society. By combining the activity of eating with the spectacle of the female body but more importantly the men on display consuming from the female body, it creates a dialogue about social behavior and gender roles.

A series of performances that question the notion of metaphorically devouring the body, each act of The Lost Suppers series examined the immaterial relationship of "dining spaces" while navigating physical proximity to others and the very nourishment we consume.
Each performance was realized in collaboration with another practice/practitioner.

Carcasses, a performance with Patrick DuPays of Z Cuisine

Photographs by Will Dunn

Where does our food come from? The process of slaughtering is a myth in our culture--an action that occurs far from our dinner tables, remote and unfathomable. We are cut off from a visceral relationship to our food. This performance questions our modes of consumption while concurrently navigating the viscinity of our bodily relationship to others.

A series of performances that question the notion of metaphorically devouring the body, each act of The Lost Suppers series examined the immaterial relationship of "dining spaces" while navigating physical proximity to others and the very nourishment we consume.
Each performance was realized in collaboration with another practice/practitioner.

Drawn and Quartered, a performance with MONGO

Photographs by Will Dunn

The torturous act of being quartered, a performance in its own right during its time, is reserved soley for human beings, and more specifically, men. Not always a successful practice, sometimes intervention was necessary by way of slicing of the tendons to help the process along.
What happens when we substitute an animal food source for the human in this gruesome spectacle? Can we reconsider meat as flesh? Can we recast ourselves as agents in the dynamic and tense act of quartering--an act analogous to our contemporary abstraction of the ugly task of slaughter into neatly consumable packages of meat?

A series of performances that question the notion of metaphorically devouring the body, each act of The Lost Suppers series examined the immaterial relationship of "dining spaces" while navigating physical proximity to others and the very nourishment we consume.
Each performance was realized in collaboration with another practice/practitioner.

Act Four, a performance with Sara Klingenstein

Photographs by Sergio Preston

The organization of a Japanese tea ceremony, private, scripted and strictly choreographed, allows for the ability to meditate. In Act Four, what can be created from skewing this framework? Can we experience spatial disruptions of sensuality, gender and ritual that challenge how we perceive private vs. public?

A series of performances that question the notion of metaphorically devouring the body, each act of The Lost Suppers series examined the immaterial relationship of "dining spaces" while navigating physical proximity to others and the very nourishment we consume.
Each performance was realized in collaboration with another practice/practitioner.

The School of Critical Engagement is operating with / within all the processes, participants, protagonists, systems, and stakeholders, that make / construct place. Place develops through interactions between human and non-human systems, nature and culture, people and space, individuals and collectives, and hegemonial and marginalized cultures and identities. Place is more than the ground on which change occurs, place is an active agent. Place is critical and needs to be critically engaged.

Place is ground zero for where "shit happens" or "things take place." Finding new, constructive, and meaningful ways to participate in place is not an option but critical to address questions of social and environmental justice, critical to thriving and not merely surviving.

The fields, disciplines, practices, and professions that are traditionally involved in understanding and changing place have fundamentally failed; it is evident in post-Katrina New Orleans, the long economic decline of Detroit and the favelas in Brazil.

It is not just practices that have failed the educational approaches based on traditional disciplinary concepts of practice are trying to make reality fit their expectations, depriving students of the opportunity to learn and participate in new languages, new practices, and new forms of interactions.

The School of Critical Engagement is:
-Fundamentally place and project based, it emphasizes: context over concept, experiences over expectations, participants over detachment, reflectiveness over preconception, and process over product.

-Fundamentally interdisciplinary: it strives to develop new languages, new practices, new ideas, new pedegogies beyond the traditional boundaries of disciplines, and practices concerned with place, people and culture. It involves bodies of knowledge, approaches, practices, and frameworks from fields that have traditionally been excluded,

-Fundamentally inclusive: it will involve people with backgrounds traditionally excluded from access to academia and higher education,

-Fundamentally discursive: based in discovery, critically, responsiveness, creativity, and reflectiveness.

It Always Rains in Bergen began to translate experientially the pause experienced living on the west coast of Norway in the mid-1990s. This space of wandering cobblestone corridors in rain gave me reflective accessibility to the story of my great-grandfather Otto Knudtson who was born on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean as his family immigrated to the United States.

Bergen, has since that time, always provided me with solace and quietness. In 2011, I will be in residency at USF Verftet to explore further several projects related to Norwegianess, sound and landscape.

KGNU Interview

Homeward is to Bound as Mourning is to Longing

Homeward—toward home; Bound—bondage, with a single bound, bounded; Mourning—the act of sorrowing; Longing—a strong desire especially for something unattainable.

Perhaps for all that we are all homeward bound—it remains the goal we struggle to realize—you may say that this is immaterial, but that is not the point, for the world is composed of parallel invisible and visible aspects—and finally we sculpt the invisible as it sculpts us.

There is no place like home. But in our constructed realities, perhaps, there is no home; we merely effort to (re)create a memory. In Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, the film adaptation from the book by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy is trying to make her way back home. She is homeward bound—longing and all the while mourning. This parallel of the constructed reality skews the viewers' perception of what is home. Dorothy is trying to make her way back to a place that may be merely an illusion.

Artist Rori Knudtson and environmental psychologist and photographer Joseph Juhasz present a collaborative installation that questions their individual perceptions of home and longing—impermanence manifested in materiality.