The Pulse Event Series takes its name from Elvia Wilk's analysis of Karen Russell's description of blossoming in The Bad Graft. Russell’s short story describes the relationship between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth as a metaphor for co-dependence between us and nature, and the couple at the centre of her story.

Neither the moth nor the tree can survive without each other. Their relationship is consummated in a tremendous blossoming referred to by a local Mojave desert ranger as a pulse event. Such a term is associated with bomb test-sites, when a measurable electromagnetic pulse occurs. Invariably – a pulse event is also an immeasurable event of the heart.

As a series of workshops, devised by Sonia Shiel in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, 3 Pulse Events generated opportunities for critique, and collaboration, to advance the narrative of Shiel’s project towards Medusa in Pieces, at VISUAL, Centre for Contemporary Art.

Pulse Event #1 is designed to test and parse ideas within Shiel’s current body of work in development, in the presence of video game researcher Benjamin Hanußek, who was invited to respond to Shiel’s material speculations and four principal themes: transposition, disembodiment, restoration, and prediction.

Performers construct a large gaming board and collaboratively rebuild a fragmented landscape, navigating it through a set of devised rules. Through a series of exercises, they explore themes of morality, touch, meta-techniques, and the formation of rules in relation to objects, spaces, and Live Action Role Play (LARP) dynamics.

Participants—including a caretaker/prop keeper, sound maker, videographer, assistants, and two NPCs (the artist and a gaming researcher)—collectively generate improvised, site-responsive narratives between performers, artworks, and audiences.

Drawing on the gaming concept of “Bleed,” where boundaries between self and fiction dissolve, the Pulse Event opens portals between gaming and painting, exploring a creative overlap between Hanušek’s gaming research and Shiel’s painting practice. The day concludes with an evening conversation between Shiel and Hanušek, reflecting on this experimental approach and questioning how artistic practice might balance intention and anarchy, digital and analogue methods, and whether fiction can meaningfully shape the real world.

Benjamin Hanußek is an educator and researcher in the field of game studies, design & development. He received his formal education at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. In 2022 he became an Austrian Marshall Plan Fellow enabling him to visit Teachers College at Columbia University in New York to conduct a research project on game-based learning. Currently, he directs PJAIT Game Lab at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw where he teaches, consults and supervises video game projects.

Pulse Event #2 takes shape in Shiel’s studio among works in progress. These works emerge from her central loose canvas processes for the VISUAL exhibition: marking out a dynamic floor installation of shifting platforms and slatted façades to form ultimately an enchanted landscape.

For this second Pulse Event, the loose canvas terrain appears in a contracted form on a 380 × 80 cm “nature-table.” And the central prop is an architectural model of the VISUAL venue.

The recorded conversation, mediated by Kunstverein Aughrim Director - Kate Strain, with acclaimed theatre director and The Viewpoints Book co-author Anne Bogart— explores serendipity, nature, and dislocation across two disciplines: one traditionally static but experienced in motion, and the other traditionally in motion but experienced seated.

Anne Bogart is a theater and opera director and former Co-Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Works with SITI include Radio Christmas Carol, Falling & Loving; The Bacchae, Chess Match No. 5; Lost in the Stars; The Theater is a Blank Page; Persians; Steel Hammer; A Rite; Café Variations; Trojan Women (After Euripides); American Document; Antigone; Under Construction; Freshwater; Who Do You Think You Are; Radio Macbeth; Hotel Cassiopeia. Recent operas include Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale, Handel’s Alcina, Dvorak’s Dimitrij Verdi’s Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma and Bizet’s Carmen. She is the author of six books, including: A Director Prepares; and The Viewpoints Book.

Pulse Event #3 takes place during Kunstverein Aughrim’s Autumn Preview. A walking performance through nearby woods, following a trail along the Ballycreen Brook.

Framed by the Irish festival of Lughnasa, the event begins with a pagaent on a looped river isalnd, where actors retrieve and conjure the bones of a river. With a light lunch is served en route and the audience drink an elexir before returning to the Kunstverein. The gathered objects complete Shiel’s Supernatural Bureau.

Beginning with a reading from her essay collection Death by Landscape, Wilk joins remotely from another woodland to discuss fan nonfiction and our relationship to narrative and the natural world.The event concludes with a conversation and reading by writer Elvia Wilk inside Shiel’s Supernatural Bureau.

Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, n+1, The Paris Review online, Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, Frieze, WIRED, and The White Review. She received a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant for short-form art writing and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute. She teaches widely and is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal.