workshops


FRIDAY 7th December 


WORKSHOP: BODIES OF COLOUR
book

11:00-17:00 Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus
Leader: PROF. JOHANNES BIRRINGER, (DAP-Lab) Brunel University of West London with Michele Danjoux

For this workshop, Birringer suggests a reflection on the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (shown at Tate Modern, June-September 2007): "Oiticica moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called 'Quasi-Cinema' (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of Vivencia and the Supra-Sensorial).

"The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are 'wearables' (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables and close-to-the-skin interfaces."

For INTIMACY we will invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by playing with fabrics and cameras, self-portraits and animations of others, wearing cloth and special garments with sensors, touching upon the erotics of materials and feedbacks,  interacting in a tactile sensorial manner within the mediated environment (images, sounds, colours).

WORKSHOP: INTIMATE DETAILS ONLY  book

10:00-18:00 Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus
Leader: KIRA O'REILLY

Dispersed, elaborated and localised intimacies cluster and move between the complex webs of you and I.
Drag lines and spindles of utterances.
Radical tangos.
Scalpels teasing tissue apart.

Peculiar occurrences of confidence and trust, wonderment and astonishment manifest, unannounced from our reassembling and disassembling of events that unfold, processes that cascade in our designed moments of actions, performances, makings and unmakings.

Sometimes it means that someone thinks I love them. Or that they have love me. It gets all mixed up.

Perhaps we can figure out how to occupy some of the pauses, lapses and moments within this conflicting and confusing concept of intimacy. 

Perhaps not.
Perhaps we initiate wilful failures and radical dissociations.
Perhaps we will break our hearts in some disastrous dissasemblage.


SATURDAY 8th December

WORKSHOP: INTIMACY AND RECORDED PRESENCE  - book
10:30-14:30 Goldsmiths George Wood Theatre
Leader: KELLI DIPPLE, Tate

This workshop will explore intimacy and presence within the context of the recorded image, using this as a basis for form, instruction-based action and one-to-one performance. The camera is often the interface between performer, action and technology. It is a key element in the relationships between kinaesthetic forms and digital outputs. It is an important starting point and often under estimated. The relationship between performer and camera operator, whether working towards a pre-recorded or live output can be a creative and conversational partnership. With attention and development it can be a complex dialogue involving the intimate exchange of much knowledge. Participants will explore the power of cinematography in the creation of intimacy and presence. Sound will also be discussed as an integral element.

WORKSHOP: AVATAR PASTE AND CODE SOUP IN FIRST AND SECOND LIFE
14:00-18:00 www.secondlife.com - FREE book via email to drp01mc (at) gold.ac.uk
Leaders: ASS. PROF. SANDY BALDWIN, West Virginia University & ALAN SONDHEIM

This workshop will take place in the virtual world Second Life, and will be conducted by Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, with participation by other artists and performers in Second Life.

Participants from the Intimacy conference will be supplied with location and others details within Second Life. The workshop emerges from Sondheim and Baldwin's ongoing exploration of analog and digital bodies, using a range of technologies to remap the solid and obdurate real of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital, and then back again into real physical spaces. The "avatar paste" of the title means at least three things.

Firstly, the pasting of viewpoints together, the suturing of the subject into the avatar. Secondly, paste as glue, as half-liquid and half solid, as a materiality of renewable and
infinite pliability. This is the chora of the avatar, the body matrix that is less a framework than a smearing of paste. And thirdly, paste as pasty and dis/comfortable substance, paste as slimy and dripping. While this abjection is already implicit in paste as glue, the pastiness of paste involves the projection and dreaming through of the avatar, the inhabitation of avatar bodies and the emptying of real bodies into the avatar.

"Avatar paste" comes out in avatar motions and behaviors. Firstly, these are formed by symbolic orders, presenting surfaces to read in terms of sexuality, power, emotion, and other projections. At the same time, the pasty avatar body tends towards collapse and abjection. Work on the avatar becomes a choreography of exposure and rupture, modeling and presenting inconceivable and untenable data, within which  tensions and relationships are immediate and intimate. One might imagine, then, this inconceivable data as a form of organism itself: as part of a natural world or a world
already given; out of this we might think through new ideas of landscape, wilderness, hard ecology, the earth itself.

The workshop will theorize and demonstrate these topics. The first part discusses theoretical frameworks. Alan Sondheim will introduce the topic of dismemberment and telepresence in terms of the presence or appearance of abjection in Second Life avatars. He will connect this to the epistemology of emptiness vis-a-vis sheave theory and Buddhist philosophy, and then to the problems of motion and behavior of avatars. Sandy Baldwin will discuss the topography of limits in Second Life, both body limits and spatial limits, an connect this to issues of the hunt and animal display.

He will also discuss the dynamics of performance and audience in Second Life. The second part of the workshop will show off Sondheim and Baldwin's approach to re-mapping live bodies into Second Life performances, including: video and other
examples of motion capture and scanning; intermediate processing of files (e.g. editing .bvh data or working with Blender); and then the resulting works, including documents of Second Life performances and re-mappings back into "first life" spaces with dancers and other live performers. The final part of the workshop will include avatar performance by Sondheim, Baldwin, and other participants in Second Life.