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Prototyping Social Forms Techniques Workshop 1: Enacting and Sensing Body

PSF Techniques Workshop 1: Enacting and Sensing Body

Muindi F. Muindi, Xin Wei Sha, Desiree Foerster, Nadia Chaney, Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Garrett Laroy Johnson and Dulmini Perera

Part of the Prototyping Social Forms “Un altro mondo è possibile” Stream
Anticipation Conference @ ASU 16-18 November 2022

“Detourning” the notion of anticipation, we offer a workshop on enacting alternatives to what is the case. Supplementing techniques for extrapolating from the present to the future, the interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) develops platforms, tactics, and technologies to make locally generated knowledge transportable and transformable, forming such knowledge into “germs” that can “sprout” in disparate learning and research environments.

This 90 minute Techniques Workshop focusses on embodied experience.

Germ #1 – Rhythm: We conduct a sequence of rhythm games that can be played in a hybrid setting with participants in both zoom and in live space: breathing, countups, comings-and-goings, foraging rhythm, …. These etudes are one step toward a multi-scale and multi-valent sensing of the dynamics of hyper-complex biosocial phenomena, like cities or languages. Duration 45 mins: three rounds of progressively more elaborate rhythm games, physical room | outdoors + streaming videoconference or good cell reception. (Rhythmanalysis, Lighting and rhythm).

Germ #2 – Time Zone: Interrupted Reading and the Voice of Time (Nadia Chaney): Attending to “unbidden” thoughts and images while reading aloud together, without eschewing intellectual or critical reflections. As conscious and unconscious (or explicit and tacit?) reflections bloom into the group space, the reading time thickens and a new voice can be heard; neither author nor readers, a surplus vocality. We call this the voice of time. Participants then listen together to this voice of time and record it together as a response to the interrupted reading.

Germ 3: Atmosphere (Muindi (Foerster)) We adapt techniques for preparing selves for sensing non-local, extended qualities of atmosphere and metabolism, interpreted as multivalent fields of distributed matter, energy, affect. In particular we introduce Butoh techniques that can be exercised with people in their own rooms as well as in a comfortable outdoor / indoor common space

Some of these can (should) be played both in-person and via video-conference. We checked Flexible, meaning some of the workshop etudes are designed to be activity co-ordinated between local in-person and telematic remote participants (e.g. Rhythm games), whereas others need to be done in-person (e.g. Recipe meal).

Related research stream: Alter-Eco