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IAS Creative Fellow 2022-23
Carolin Meyer is a multidisciplinary artist & DJ, working at the intersections of art and research and deploying sound, video, sculpture, music, performance, collage, writing and found objects to create multi-sensory and immersive artistic interventions. Shaped by her experience of transracial adoption at birth (from Kurdish Yazidi to German), she is primarily interested in embodiment and the body, and deeply committed to making socially engaged work that is viscerally affective. Other topics of interest are identity, racialisation, techno-social transformations and other 'hot button issues', such as isolation in Covid-times, climate change and AI.
In 2019, her work on the subject of personalisation won the 1st prize in a competition run by ‘People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation’, a research project funded by a Collaborative Award in the Medical Humanities and Social Sciences from The Wellcome Trust, 2018-2022.
In 2020, she graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, in the experimental, practice-based postgraduate degree Visual Sociology, where students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including art, design, anthropology, media and communications, cultural studies, geography and sociology, were invited to use visual, sensory and inventive methods to understand and intervene in the social world.
Collective experience of music & ecstatic participation as research
By collaboratively creating site-specific soundscapes and DJ sets that are to be collectively experienced, Carolin aims to inspire students to actively employ music as a way of doing research beyond borders, languages and cultures. In particular, her interest in ecstatic participation will guide her work as Creative Fellow. She understands ecstatic participation not simply as a process of standing outside of one's body, but as complex reciprocal exchange between bodies and the world. Furthermore, ecstasis can elicit subjective experiences, which are crucially based on participants’ embodied reactions to sounds and music, thereby creating a space for knowledge production that has the human body at its centre.
An initial workshop, open to all, on 4 October 2023 at the IAS, will be on art that employs and considers ecstatic participation, as well as quotes that suggest knowledge production that reflects the messy realities we live in. There will be a gathering of euphoric and ecstatic sounds, i.e. sounds that transport us in some way, which she plans to make into a soundscape.
In a follow-up event, the soundscape will be made accessible to all, so that participants in the soundscape as well as passers-by at the university can experience it. She hopes to gather their reflections by way of feedback sharing online and/or physically. The findings will be collected and again woven into a rich tapestry of recorded sounds and music.
