Jenny Hval - I Want to Be a Machine
I want to be a machine is an interdisciplinary musical performance featuring new music written and performed by Jenny Hval and three musicians. It is also an essay, written on the stage, with words, images, acoustic and electric instruments and non-instruments, about what it means to be on that stage.
As a young art student, Hval was introduced to the play Die Hamletmaschine (1977) by the German playwright and poet Heiner Müller. This piece made a contemporary avantgarde machine out of the famous Shakespeare play, which for Hval closely resembled her idea of what the pop artist and pop music could be: Broken pieces of fallen greatness and human experience, placed back together to tell other, stranger and more exhilarating stories.
I want to be a machine is a return to this question – what stories the artist could tell – at a time when music has lost almost all its value as a physical, visceral and philosophical experience.
Participants: Jenny Hval, Håvard Volden, Jenny Berger Myhre, Linn Nystadnes