Jan. 25: Artistic Practice Session #4. DE-COMPOSE: Embodied Image (Un)making With Our Cellular Devices

This artistic immersion session centers on embodied movement-image creation using the camera-devices we carry with us day-to-day. It offers a practice for beginning to metabolize and de-compose our learned extractive modes of image “capture”.

This session is not about making a beautiful image or taking the perfect shot. It is an invitation to move together as reconfigured land, to attempt and practice decentring and disinvesting from modes of image-making that empower the ego and reinforce paradigms of human exceptionalism. We invite participants to join us in approaching the body as transmitter and receiver of bioelectric signal, sensing into the circuits we are shaping and being shaped by in mutual contact. 

This session asks: How does the land in our hands behold us? Can we witness our mobile recording device as an entity that sees and touches us as we see and touch it? How do our bodies respond to being imaged in unfamiliar, perhaps unsettling ways? What might it take to un-numb to the pains and pleasures of our entanglement with minerals and their systems of extraction?

By engaging with playful partnered panoramic image-making and somatic noticing practices, this session invites participants to practice spilling into unfamiliar, perhaps monstrous shapings, in collaboration with more-than-human intelligences, while attuning to the violations of land and communities that make these devices accessible to us. This is a practice in which we ask participants to treat discomfort, laughter, despair, curiosity as equally welcome visitors.  

Participants are invited to come to this session with their own smartphone or tablet fully charged and ready to record panorama images. If you are completely against taking a photo or having your photo taken, this artistic immersion session will not suit you. 

Space is limited to 16 participants, registration is required, accessibility requests are welcome.

This workshop is part of a series of 6 Artistic Practice Immersion Sessions for nurturing intellectual and relational stamina in the context of the Climate and Nature Emergency.

Led by artists Alysha Seriani and Reed Jackson.