Description (en)
Kay, or a Case for Intensity is artistic research that explores the concept of intensity
as a reciprocity of body and language. It focuses on emotional states such as “fucking”,
“loving”, and “grieving”. It attempts to respond to questions such as:
What is intensity? Where does intensity take place in the body, in language? How can I write
or speak about intensity? How do emotion and language influence each other? To
what extent can words capture, trigger, emphasize, or mitigate emotions? What kind
of cultural codes are implied in feeling words? Can I invent new feelings, new subjectivities
in, and through, writing? Is there such a thing as an intensity of meaning?
How can meaning be modulated through different language and performance practices?
How abstract must this text be to be called “abstract”?
Clearly, concepts such as intensity, pleasure, or pain are highly subjective experiences,
and thus non-empirical. This work takes a ficto-critical approach: I, Cordula Daus,
propose a female literary character – the eponymous Kay, “a middle aged, white
woman from the European middle classes”, to speak from and about her as a protagonist
and a research ficto-subject. Intensity will thus not be approached as a problem of
representation of a real feeling, but as a metric, the eponymous Intensity of Kay, practiced
through literary writing, lecture performances, and other artistic forms. I investigate
this subject as a female writer-artist.
My dissertation is situated at the intersection of artistic research, literature, and a general
study of feelings. It consists of an ensemble of artistic works including the novel
SEHR, and this reflexive documentation. As in previous works, I appropriate and
translocate vocabulary and methods from other sciences and disciplines such as seismology,
sociology, phenomenology, and linguistics.
Broadly speaking, my artistic practices fall under five categories: theory as material;
semi-fictionality; writing as research; questionology; and lecture performance.
Those practices include intertwined methodologies and mutating micro-practices
that include in-depth reading, excerpting, re-sensing, online-dating, interviewing,
auto-ethnography, phenomenology, co-fabulation, role play, performative writing,
site-writing, live writing, free writing, fictocriticism, vocalization, mixing, and sound experiments.