I am a visual artist-researcher in the field of cultural studies at the Centre for Practise as Research in Theatre (T7) at the Tampere University, Finland. I currently work on my doctoral research on traffic cultures and movement, especially biking. I explore communication, mediations, and aesthetics of moving bodies in a shared milieu, the urban space, focusing on how we encounter others, including non-human actants and how we communicate the desires that guide our ways.
Listening to the ‘Noise’ in Biking and Communicating in Traffic
Listening to the “noise” in biking and communicating in traffic presents an arts-based research about movement by bike. With biking as a research method, I explore the multi-modal ways of communicating while biking in urban spaces.
Biking affords a method of becoming aware of the complex relations of moving (and non-moving) actants, and at the same time biking itself is felt and treated as interference or “noise” in the conventional concept of traffic.
The concept of noise (Serres, 1982) opens up the complex choreographies of our movement in traffic, and sheds light on how they are communicated while biking.
The aim of this research project is to develop performances around biking in public spaces, and in this way, to problematize the hegemonic understandings of traffic and traffic culture, as well as to discuss the theoretical setting of embodied and artistic knowledge production.
An example of my work in progress (in Finnish):
Susi, V. ‘UTOOPPISTEN RUUMIIDEN VILLI PYÖRÄILY‘, [The Wild Biking of Utopian Bodies], RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research, 17/2021. https://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.1173187
(Photos copyright Vappu Susi)