Sissel Marie Tonn

Selected Works [2014-2018]

°1986 -DK
Sissel Marie Tonn’s practice focuses on sensory structures of attention and per-
ception within environments undergoing change. Recent work combines writing,
multi-media installations and wearable objects and instruments that open up ques-
tions of the biological, social, mental and ethical implications of perceiving (and thus
potentially acting upon) environments undergoing change.

Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist based in The Hague. She is the co-founder of the
initiative Platform for Thought in Motion together with artist Jonathan Reus. Together
with Flora Reznik they arrange reading groups and other events in The Hague, en-
gaging artists with scholars in a mutual exchange of knowledge. She completed a
master in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2015. In 2016
she was the recipient of the Theodora Niemeijer prize for emerging female artists
and was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2017.
The project focuses on man-made earthquakes that have occurred
over the last 32 years in the largest field for natural gas in Europe,
located in the Dutch province of Groningen. While researching this
phenomenon the artist came across an overwhelming amount of
data available in scientific archives: A warehouse full of core samples,
rows upon rows of sand and soil tests in laboratories. Furthermore,
all the seismic activity of the earthquakes is meticulously recorded,
stored and publicised in the immense digital data bank of the Dutch
Meteorological Institute.

Meanwhile, visiting people living in the province and hearing their

stories of feeling the earthquakes frequently passing through their
bodies and their homes, she wondered about the role of the sensing
body in archiving these events. As some people in the Groningen Gas
Field claim to wake up in their beds, before they feel the tremors across
the earth, one may ask: is the sensation of a man-made earthquake
fundamentally different than the sensation of a natural one?

The Intimate Earthquake Archive aims to connect the digitized seismic

activity with the sensing body. Visitors can explore the archive by
positioning themselves among a series of radio-transmitting core
samples. Each of them transmits the dataset of one of the 12 strongest
man-made earthquakes recorded in Groningen. Wearable „interfaces“
act as receivers for these signals, producing a composition of tremors The Intimate Earthquake Archive
on the surface of the body - in the same way the seismic waves moved
across the land. Multi-media project, 2016-ongoing
These vibratory compositions are created by artist Jonathan Reus,
Collaborations: Jonathan Reus, Marije Baalman &
through direct manipulation of the archival datasets into sonic
vibrations. The resulting compositions are intended to inspire „deep
Carsten Tonn-Petersen
listening“ within the body. The Intimate Earthquake Archive is thus a
kind of test ground for the visitor to attune herself to a future marked Venues: Van Abbemuseum, NL, Artefakt festival Stuk,
by man-made geological change. BE, Ballroom Marfa, Tx
‘The Intimate Earthquake Archive’
Solo presentation at Van Abbemuseum, 2016
Video documentation by Tanja Busking
‘Apparatuses of Attunement’
Screenprinted wall piece for Artefakt Festival, 2018
New developments for Artefakt Festival, 2018
“Some people in the gas fields wake up seconds before an earthquake
is felt. They cannot explain exactly why, but they believe it might be
because of some extremely fine-tuned sensitivity to the pressure waves
preceding the vibrations. Not unlike birds flying low before a storm, or
dolphins beaching themselves before a tsunami. 

Rijn recounts when the government and industry still did not recognize
that the earthquakes were indeed induced by the drilling for gas.
Later the companies were forced to admit the consequences of their
drilling, but the extraction of gas was too important for the economy to
discontinue. As the earthquakes became more frequent and heavier, and
old houses and barns started collapsing, a cap was put on the amount of
gas extraction allowed. But the possibility for earthquakes will be there
well into the future, as the heaviness of the earth pushes down on the
emptied-out gas reservoirs.

 It is unknown at what magnitude future earthquakes will be. No

matter how many probes, how many 3D models constructed, and how
much data collected, a full survey of the earth below its crust is still
unavailable to humans.

Rijn is one of those who claim to wake up before an earthquake is felt.

As he drives me around the area, to proudly show the work he used to
do in the region during his years as a civil engineer, he stops at an old
school. “Here the children are making earthquake alert exercises,” he
says. They are instructed to hide under the tables at the first sensation
of an earthquake.” I recall the account of a friend from Japan: If you
live with in an earthquake zone a subconscious anticipation of the next
earthquake is always with you. The body attuned to the vibrations it has
learned entail danger.”

- Excerpt from the publication ‘Daily Research’- a Burial History of

Exhaustion. Read edition published for Inflexions Journal here.
What do we make of this reciprocal relationship between the
constellation of matter and forces that we call our bodies, and
the surrounding environment - this membrane that is elastic and
malleable, trans-corporeal, porous and leaky? 

The Escargotapien is a sculptural ‘outline’ of the body, a tool

to animate the space between the skin and the surrounding
environment. I am interested in the idea of an object that works as a
conceptual tool for examining ‘what goes into being a person’, as the
architects Arakawa & Gins would say. The architect couple plays a
pivotal role in my research, specifically the way in which they enrol
architecture as a procedural tool to act on the inherent potentials for
plasticity within the body. For them, what goes into being a person
is always in the doing, and their diagrammatic dwelling places make
sure the body keeps re-harmonizing itself to its surroundings, which
in their conception will halt the degradation of human tissue and
thereby defy death (the architecture to defy death is perhaps actually
a set of architectural procedures to activate life-living, and create an
awareness of the intrinsic entanglements between the living body and
the built environment).

 The escargotapien suits are made of large amounts of slippery fabric,

as well as inserts of semi-transparent fabrics and sometimes other
harder materials. They are inspired by Arakawa & Gin’s ‘Ubiquitous Becoming Escargotapien
Site House’, a speculative house that must be continuously folded and
molded in order to be lived-in. Similarly the Escargotapien suit, in it’s Multi-media project, 2017-ongoing
slippery masses of fabric, allows the wearer to explore the relationship
between body and the more intimate layer of exterior architecture,
Collaborations: Studio Ricky van Broekhoeven
clothes. They are performative as well as sculptural and are meant to
be activated by different bodies seeking their own outlines.
Venues: Stroom Den Haag, NL, CCA Andratx, ES, Jan
van Eyck Open Studios, NL
‘Composing Attention’
at CCA Andratx, Mallorca 2016
“... Are you in the grove now? 

Did you notice the change of sonic traces you left behind as your feet
walked from the fine stone gravel onto the asphalt? No? Go back,
this time pay specific attention to the textures of these sounds you are
bringing into the world. 

Pass the black light post into the citrus grove. There is a small path
carved out by feet that walked here before yours. 

Walk along this path until you notice a dead, artfully twisted almond
tree to the left of you, above your head. 

In front of you is the first plateau of the citrus grove. To the right you will
see the bald stony mountain tops. These have not changed. If you look
towards the right you might see trees full of little orange dots, depending
on the season. Right now, the field is a lush thick green carpet, but in
your case it might be dried out and brittle from the heat, trimmed thin
by greedy goat teeth. 

Let’s walk into the field. 

Perhaps your foot will disappear into the green thick carpet of clover like
mine does. Perhaps, like me, you feel a slight worry at the sight of your
feet covered by bushy, wet heart-shaped leaves. As you move into the field
you may notice the small pot holes and bumps in the soil, that your feet
have to navigate. 

You are looking down as you walk. This is unknown territory. Identify
how you are effortlessly putting one foot in front of the other, balancing
artfully on one leg at a time. “

“Composing Attention” - permanent audio guide for the orange grove

at CCA Andratx, Mallorca. Link to Audio
Becoming Escargotapien
Stroom, Den Haag 2017
Becoming Escargotapien - video (password: gastropod)
Link to Video
“If you want us to tell you about what it was like living in that
primordial soup, we can’t tell you much. We can describe to you what
our existence was all about: Sucking. Sucking on all there was to suck:
a uniform bacterial mat covering the surface of those rocks we were
clinging to. 

We had no significant form, nor any bilateral symmetry, not one hole
was distinguishable from the other - that was how we conceived of
our bodies. The water around us fed us and we fed on it, through the
whole pulpy surface of our bodies. The vibrations of the streams hitting
us determined how we made out the outline of what was us, what
distinguished our bodies from the body of water around us. In this
time, you have to remember, soft tissue like gels and aerosols, muscle
and nerve reigned supreme. The primordial soup was our kingdom. We
were all mostly watery, only a few cell differences making up a soft and
malleable membrane, an almost imperceptible difference between
inside and outside. (...)

But the mineral world was stirring. It was, as if geology wanted to

reassert that it is indeed not only the silent backdrop for evolution.
Violent moves of tectonic plates washed huge amounts of mineral
matter into the oceans, and we could feel these new vibrations, this new
material penetrating the membranes of our soft bodies. And we started
responding to this penetration, something was happening inside our
bodies. It was not an intentional thing, but rather like the automatic
movements of a mechanical toy that has just been turned. We started
secreting the stuff that our bodies had absorbed, in a systematic fashion.
It started as a mineralization around the basal membrane of the
throat of some organisms, and slowly, as we each secreted in our own
ways, tooth-like structures, protective shields and swirly shells started
enveloping our bodies.“

Becoming Escargotapien - performative reading at the Jan van Eyck,

2017 (co-presentation with artist Rasmus Nielausen)
“Circling the Mountain is the ascetic practice of the legendary Tendai
monks of Mount Hiei, where they run a marathon for 1000 days. Within
this practice several gruelling 9 day fasts are also implemented, with the
intention of bringing the body as close as possible to death. The idea is to
exhaust the mind, the body, everything, until nothing is left. this nothing
may be filled with the vast consciousness that lies below the surface of
our lives. When the monks fast their sensory awareness comes crashing
through, and they can hear the ash fall from an incense stick. By the end
of their run they know every leaf, every bird song and seasonal change
along their route around the mountain. “ - Excerpt from Script

The lecture was about the possible connection between an ultra

runner who uses extreme exhaustion in 6 day races to obtain spiritual
transcendence, and the exhaustion of the earth. The perfomance
lecture consisted of uncovering different relationalities between this
form of exhaustion as potential, the spinozean idea of “we do not know
what a body can do” and the potentials for cognitive development
towards more attuned perceptions of environmental change.

As the session progressed I built a mountain from peat, a now-

exhausted semi-renewable fossil fuel. Peat is an accumulation of
partially decayed vegetation or organic matter accumulated over
thousands of years. The evolution of peat digging was eerily similar
to the mining of fossil fuels today. When the easiest accessible Circling the Mountain
reserves were exhausted, they would come up with more advanced
technologies to mine harder-to-reach resources. This industry, which Performance lecture series, 2016-2017
carried the country into prosperity in the Dutch golden age is still
inscribed into the land, leaving large parts of countrysides looking like
Venues: Van Abbemuseum, NL and Perdu Theatre,
broad-teeth combs of land strips and water. The land surface of The
Netherlands is a literal tracing of the relationship between industry,
NL, as part of the Modes of Existence workshop at
prosperity and the exhaustion of the land. Thus peat is also a cultural Amsterdam University
archive.
Circling The Mountain lecture performance
as part of The Intimate Earthquake Archive finissage, Van Abbemuseum, 2017
In this project we explore the relationships between consciousness,
body and environment, as mediated by the filtration mechanisms of
the senses.

In February of 2016 we traveled to the cloud forests of Madeira in

order to create a contemporary entry into the herbarium of the Jardim
Botanico in Funchal. The herbarium holds an archive of conserved
plant species and taxidermized animals dating back to the 16th
century, and serves as a blueprint of the history of colonization and
acclimatization of plant species from the New World.

In Madeira we created worn biometric and body-extension

instruments to challenge the body’s conditioned attention in a playful
way. We see them as wayfinding apparatuses for reshaping a worldview
– knowing momentarily without focus – creating an alternative
cartography that is attentive to subtle fluctuations of change. We used
these instruments to create a durational site-specific performance
that became the point of departure for a video essay about the act of
mapping.
Cartographies of Human Sensation
The trip culminated with an exhibition in the natural history museum
of the botanical gardens, where we exhibited our instruments and Collaborative research project with Jonathan Reus
annotated biometric data logs side-by-side with century-old archived
plant specimens, as a contemporary entry into their collection. Venues: Jardim Botanico, Madeira,PT,
The Sensory Cartographer
2016 -Video Essay

https://vimeo.com/160524211
The title for this exhibition was taken from the seminal essay by this
name by Thomas Nagel, in which he dissecting the landscape between
subjective and objective experience in the search for consciousness.
It was exhibited in conjunction with Dewi de Vree’s and Patrizia
Ruthensteiner’s project Magnetoceptia.

In this project we explore the relationships between consciousness,

body and environment, as mediated by the filtration mechanisms
of the senses. At the center of the project is the creation of worn
instrumentations for rethinking collection, categorization and
navigation from the perspective of the moment.

This exhibition is a response to the exhibition held at the Jardim

Botanico herbarium in Madeira. While the first exhibition attempted
to create a contemporary entry of biometric data collected for their
400-year old archive of plant specimens, this exhibition reflects upon
the colonial history of collection in Madeira, which was a stopping
point for acclimatization of foreign plant species before they were
brought to the orangeries of Europe for the enjoyment and prestige of
the European royalty. We imagined the exhibition as an overflowing of
biometric data, to be considered by a contemporary audience within What Is It Like To Be A Bat
the manicured and acclimatized space of the orangerie.

Exhibition/workshop with Jonathan Reus

The exhibition culminated in a performance developed through
a 2 day workshop with local artists using worn biometric sound
synthesizers outside in the courtyard of the orangerie. Venues: Jardim Botanico, Madeira,PT,
When Alice falls through the rabbit hole the reality around her
undergoes constant and profound changes, while her ways of dealing
with that reality do not. Boundaries between humans and non-
humans, order and chaos, reality and fantasy blur, and she eventually
realizes that she has to continuously adjust her perception of her
surroundings, in order to navigate and understand them. Alice must
walk away from a destination in order to reach it – it’s an adjustment to
a place without stable laws.

Lac-Mégantic is a small town of 6.000 people in Quebec, Canada,

whose name derives from the Abenaki word namesokanjik, which
translates to “place where the fish are held”. The work Mégantic
similarly addresses the perception of place, by means of zooming in
on the periphery of changing ecologies. A local mushroom collector
navigates an environment in which he has lived his whole life 2 years
after a fatal disaster: In July 2013 a train carrying crude oil derailed
and exploded in the downtown core, killing 47 people and irreversibly
contaminating a large area.

Having always been fascinated with these mysterious organisms, a

new dimension of change has entered into the relationship between Mégantic (Where The Fish Are Held)
the mushroom collector and the mushrooms. Knowing that fungi are
uniquely capable of consuming and concentrating toxins he no longer
2 channel video, 2014-2015
feels safe eating them.

Small gestures in the periphery of this politically charged space Venues: 1646 gallery, KABK graduation show, NL
becomes the point of entry. With attention paid to the persistent traces
of human intervention into every organism and to the disappearance
and morphing of matter in its wake.
Video 1: Mushroom (pw: scan)
https://vimeo.com/122463937

Video 2: Marc (pw: fungi)

https://vimeo.com/118393798
6 people from around the world working on the online platform
Odesk were employed to create digital renderings of their physical
workspaces. Work Spaces uses the collected screen capture footage of
skype conversations between the artist and employees to explore the
aesthetics of presence within the contemporary globalized, digitized
workplace . The work explores the pixellated and blurred out spaces
and bodies of the workers, depicting how the glitches and delays as an
effect of the software and connectivity can serve as a way of perceiving
the gap between a mediated encounter as opposed to an unmediated
one.

The soundscape is compiled from the pauses in the conversation

– breaths, awkward silences and network hiccups, creating an
impression of the shared acoustic space unique to each conversation.
These errors, present, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Nancy, a double
movement: A birth to presence as well as a vanishing of presence.
They become artifacts of presence by exposing a connection that is
permeated with absence. The work will offer an alternative view of
the capturing gesture of the media around us. The work seeks a sense
of capture that is as old as media itself, a special magic, of freezing
presence in time, as analog photography was praised to do by theorists Work Spaces
of the 20th century. The work is aiming to subvert the conception of
compartmentalizing working relationships as merely data transaction,
2 channel video and sculpture, 2014
and, in it’s attempt to discover the tangibly present human in the faults
of communication media, requests a way of transferring data back into
presence. Venues: Quartair Gallery, Gemak Gallery and Bland,
Boring, Banal conference at University of Amsterdam
Video preview
(password: telematic)
Machar(*Mosquito) investigates the complexities of mediated
human interaction. On the basis of researching PTSD among drone
operators, the work questions how we perceive others when they are
mediated through moving images displayed on a screen. The artist
re-enacts the voyeuristic and mundane looking of the operators and
thus investigates the complexities of the engagement and affective
reactions to what is displayed on the screen. Furthermore the solitary
consumption of online media is contextualized, questioning the space
for building affective and empathetic relations to perceiving violent
visual imagery online.

... Researching the complexities of drone war by looking at drone

footage on Youtube was very shocking to me. I noticed the importance
of the speed with which we digests visual imagery, and the paradox
of affective responses and the distance occurring within the viewer.
By creating a Zoetrope I wanted to make a visual investigation of
the screen in a historical context – as a reaction to the speed of the
flow of clips Youtube I forced it into the form and speed of one of the
first screens invented. Here the viewer can decide the speed of the
moving image herself, and reflect upon the meaning of speed when
encountering moving images. Media Archaeology investigates the
importance of looking at the development of media objects in order to
understand our relationship with them today within a time perspective Machar
to break the illusion of timelessness.... The Zoetrope is an attempt
to visualize the correlation between Virilio’s idea of war and cinema 1 channel video and sculpture, 2013
being interrelated, and it’s shape and material is inspired by the burnt,
crumbling metal of the war airplanes in the Technical Museum Berlin. Venues: KABK gallery, NL, Gold und Beton gallery, DE,
Brains, Maps, Rhythms Conference, UvA Amsterdam
Video Preview (password: machar)
European Media Arts Festival, Kunsthalle Osnabruck,
DE