General Arka aka Ingrid Hoelzl is a media theorist and performance artist currently based in Hamburg, Germany where she is on the board of the Verein fuer aktuelle Musik (VAMH) and member of the Dachverband fuer freie Darstellende Kuenste (dfdk).
While based in Hong Kong as Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media she was the founding member of of AGE / Algorithmic Glitch Ensemble (2015)) and Archetype Ensemble (2016) and a member of Floating Projects where she organized, among others, the event Interspecies Musicking (2017). While based in Budapest as a Visiting Scholar and Artist at Central European University, she initiated (with Remi Marie) the platform General Humanity which brings together theory, art and activism and functions as a production platform for her projects from 2018 onwards: Stringfigures (2019), an iterative performance which brings together Donna Haraway’s concept of “stringfigures” with Heinrich von Kleist’s theory of the puppet, and Postimage Operaaahhh!!! (2019), an experimental performance premiered at the Collegium Helveticum, Zurich in June 2019 as the closing event of her Marie-Curie Fellowship there. The performance brought together theory, poetry and performance; sound, movement and image; human, animal, and mineral sounding. She is now working on a follow-up project, entitled The Common Image.
Her work integrates movement and sound improvisation with conceptual performance, theory and poetry; extended voice, clarinet and martial arts. She has performed solo in Europe and Asia at experimental venues and festivals and has collaborated with experimental musicians and dancers such as Georgia Hoppe (DE), Emese Kovacs (HU), Chris Jäger (CH), Lars Akerlund (SE), Aron Porteleki (HU), Alfia Nakipbekova (UK), Jonathan Zorn (US), Caligine aka DJ Kimchi (TW), Lee Shi-Yang (TW), Liu Fangyi (TW), Dennis Wong (HK), William Lane (HK), Wilmer Chan (HK), Takayuki Kato (JP), and Yoshimoto Yumiko (JP). Recent recordings include the sheep bell percussion solo Tu m’ (sonnes les cloches) (2018), Dissident Musicking (2018), a collaboration with Japanese and Hungarian musicians, Frog People (2017), a collaboration with Romer’s Tree Frogs, and Suite Taiwaniana (2017), a collaboration with Taipei-based musicians.
Links:
General Arka (performance)
General Arka (music)
General Humanity (blog)
Academia.edu (texts)