Keeping our bodily balance is a continuous performance, including the effort to keep the erect posture against gravity. However, since this performance remains strictly subliminal we become aware of the state of equilibrium only in the event of disruption: in the very moment we loose our balance, stumble and fall, or more generally, when the relation between the body and the surrounding world is irritated, disturbed, or interrupted as it is characteristic in the state of vertigo.

A central goal of the artistic research project ‘Dizziness–A Resource’ is to gain a better understanding of the role of dizziness in the artistic process. As one approach towards this goal, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond teamed up with psychologists from the University of Graz to conduct an empirical investigation.

The process of slipping into dizzying freefall, of sliding into uncertainty, becoming stuck, losing one’s way, giving up are as much actions as occurrences, both active and passive. Dizziness is a midway state at the point where everything and nothing seems possible, where certainty and uncertainty are in superposition, marked by an increasing loss of control.
