Experimental Collectivities, Collaborations, and (Dis)embodied Digital Experiences

Hemispheric Institute GSI Convergence 2017

Unsettling the Americas: Radical Hospitalities and Intimate Geographies

October 5-8, 2017

Artscape Youngplace

Toronto, ON

Santiago Tavera

& in collaboration with

Candace Thompson

Arianna Garcia-Fialdini

Aviva Helena Neff

Diego Cristian Saldaña Sifuentes

Hiba Ali

Janique Johnson-Lafleur

Marton Robinson

Naomi Bennett

Danielle Alfaro

The notion of “identity,” at once self-expressive and societally repressive, is a concept that indebts us and indentures us. Messy, disharmonious, and—like all of us—ever mutable, self-definition is a malleable tool: a knife capable of both destruction and construction. Learning to wield it skillfully is a crucial task.

DAY 1 - Presentations, Mind/Body Exercises and Word Activity

This workshop generated a social collaboration between participants working towards conflict resolutions between collective and subjective narratives, our histories, and our illusions of the future. Using collaboratively created ritual we established an experimental environment for embodied and disembodied media making. The use of digital media presents the potential to simulate a state of disembodiment (elasticity, translation…), allowing for the alteration of participants’ senses, while pushing the boundaries of their perceptual thresholds and understanding of space, selves, and others. Questions of location and displacement, migration and transience, cultural heirlooms, trauma, and personal narratives—both real and imagined—can be brought to bear in creating work which integrates audio and video recording techniques, live-feed cameras, analog technologies, projection mapping, AR, installation, and performance.

DAY 2 - Multimedia and Performative Collaboration