“Art as Device” – A Theory of Perception by Viktor Shklovsky Series of lectures and seminars held by Helmi Vent, guest teacher at the College of Music and Dance and the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture, September 1–13, 2006, Ulanbaatar (Mongolia)

The series of lectures and seminars revolved around the essay “Art as Device”, a theory of perception by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, written in 1916. “This thing we call art exists in order to restore our perception of life, to enable us to feel things, to make a stone ‘stony’”, wrote Shklovsky. The remark refers to the intensification of the perception process, which, according to Shklovsky, is “an end in itself” and should be prolonged through the device of art that he calls “defamiliarization”.

In the music theater project “Strings in Conversation”, which was directly linked with this series of lectures and seminars, we explored the ramifications of this device of art through improvisations, and the experiences and insights that arose from our experiments, coupled with our study of Shklovsky's text, raised our awareness of its meaning.

As a supplement to the theoretic reflections from the seminar and the individual experiences of the artistic project practice, film documents from Helmi Vent’s performance work at the Mozarteum University Salzburg provided insights into artistic works that were developed in line with the main idea of Viktor Shklovsky’s theory.

Note:
The essay “Art as Device” (German: “Kunst als Verfahren”) was available to all participants in both the original Russian version and in the German translation. An interpreter was also on hand for the entire duration of the series of guest lectures and seminars.

Project Page: Strings in Conversation

Basic Reading

ŠKLOVSKIJ, Viktor: Die Kunst als Verfahren [1916]. In: Juri Striedter, Texte der russischen Formalisten, Vol. 1, München 1969, p. 3–35