Workshop / Re-orienting bodies: Unfolding Sensorial Unknowns

Inscriptions open: https://kenes.eventsair.com/isea2022/workshop3

• Abstract: How far into others/ beyond ‘you’ can your body extend in the hybrid worlds we inhabit?  What web-based conditions can provide a coalescing of varying practice and languages? What happens when they do? This workshop proposes three interrelated exercises to explore the involvement of the sensing body in machine-breathing-drawing-moving gestural entanglements from a critical and feminist standpoint that will culminate in a collective exhibition: 
  
  1)Kinesthesia: participants engage in corporeal explorations of stillness and movement to bring new forms of being in our bodies. Kinesthetic empathy can engage in and with another’s movement or sensorial experience of movement (Sklar). We will practice with performances by the Catalan artist Fina Miralles
  2)Surrealists’ exquisite corpse: participants will draw parts of bodies, one by one without seeing the parts of the whole they will become part of. This will enable already collective or in-between fragmented states, playing with the possibility of entangling unconscious processes.
  3)Mediated-Internet Body: participants will explore collective embodied compositions created through the collective mediated body. We will attempt this with a variety of gestural elements based on the previous 2 exercises and consider what we do and where we look while researching (note taking, shifting in our seats, managing browser tabs, etc.), using Zoom play: faux green screen, layering screenshot, etc. 
  
  This techno-body-experience workshop invokes series of minor gestures (Manning, 2016): gestures of care, of centering, body, self, hand drawing and playful engagement. It follows Sara Ahmed-ian lines such that each practice hones in on digital interaction and subsequently changes the affective response to each other—a re-orienting of our bodies. She points out: “when we follow specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain or even become out of reach” (2006, p.14). We co-compose a Bretch like-performance with multiple entry points of affective resonances and tonalities.

• Biography: We are a feminist collective originally formed to support the drafting and defending of research-creation doctoral theses at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology (Concordia University, Montreal). The collective includes researchers, artists, makers, and educators who gather to write, think and play to help ideas flow between bodies and pages, experiences and analytics. 
  
  Dr. Celia Vara is a psychologist, professor and artist. She implements research-creation methodologies drawing from kinesthesia to explore corporeality.
  
  Florencia Marchetti is a multimedia ethnographer and documentarian. Her research investigates the affective resonances of violent pasts in everyday lives through an atmospheric lens.
  
  Katja Philip is a Montreal based artist, designer, researcher and writer. Inspired by mindfulness and consciousness practices, and dada, she creates mixed media works and installations.
  
  Dr. Magdalena Olszanowski is a Polish-born artist, writer, and faculty in Cinema and Media Arts. Her dissertation is a feminist analysis of young women’s 1990s web practices.