Friday 9 March | 10.00-17.00 | University of Sussex – room to be confirmed
Possibility is not what is merely possible and should be regarded as less than real. . . . Possibility establishes and founds reality: one is what one is only if one has the power to be it. (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation)
This series of advanced training workshops explore media practices as a process-based means for extending research into new realms. While practice focused, these workshops are open to any CHASE researchers who’d like to develop their projects by engaging with forms of media in relation to their writing.
Philosophical reflections of the possible, introduced primarily via the enigmatic thinker Maurice Blanchot, intersect with the possible of Design Thinking and computational practices to create an interdisciplinary contact zone. Through discussion and research exchange, researchers develop considerations of media not as an end goal, but as modular units that further the reach of discourse and cross scholarly and other institutional frameworks.
The workshops will model methods for considering process-based media as necessarily situated and lead writer-practitioners in interrogating the particularities of their own research, allowing for the crafting of possibilities introduced through forms of media. By bringing together epistemologies from Continental Philosophy, Media, Design, Art Practice, Computing and Anthropology the series also supports on-going discussion and debates on decolonising knowledge frameworks and the limits of transdisciplinary approaches. Readings and written reflections in preparation for the workshops combine with hands’ on experimentation with media to further inquiry into the possible in relation to research.
Title: Continuous corpo-realities <-> diagramming probabilities and possibilities!
9 March 2018 10am-5pm University of Sussex
How do digital tools, environments and research co-construct each other? How can you trace the materiality of your research? How might you diagram the interdependencies of your research sites? What are some of the possible re-mappings and re-imaginings that might occur?
During the one day workshop with Possible Bodies, participants will share their own work and collaborate to diagram and reimagine the continuum of 3D industries (from MRI scans to the pharmacopornographic, from military training suites to architectonic management software, from fossil fuel prospecting to ultrasound cross-sections in mining, from spectacular special effects to gaming engines … and back). Together we will investigate the semiotic-material matrix where so-called bodies cohabit within the boundaries of the probable and… perhaps we will glimpse some potential voxels. How might 3D practices call for the reinvention of the theories used to talk of “corpo-reality”? What other possible bodies could emerge? The workshop will activate mapping and diagramming practices for collective research on the concrete and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. Paying particular attention to the posthuman condition of the infrastructures, technologies and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning, it will invite the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments.
Biographies: Possible Bodies is a research collaboration between Femke Snelting (Constant, Brussels) and Jara Rocha (Bau Design College of Barcelona). Possible Bodies develops work at the intersection of design, transfeminisms and free software. Possible Bodies is made possible with support from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Constant, Bau Design College of Barcelona, Hangar and the Flemish Government.
Emile Devereaux is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media in the School of Media, Film and Music and Associate of the Sussex Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex. His current research interrogates the situatedness of digital media interactions and philosophies of technologies. Recent investigations combine participatory mapping technologies and design approaches for speculative futures.
Helen Pritchard is a Lecturer in Computational and Digital Arts and head of BSc Digital Arts Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current work brings together the fields of Computational Aesthetics, Environmental Media, and Feminist TechnoScience. She is the editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (Autonomedia, NY) and is an assistant editor of Big Data & Society.