KEYNOTE: The Centre for Emotional Materiality
In lieu of a standard keynote address and in keeping with our focus on Contact, affect, and collaboration, our featured speakers will be the members of the Centre for Emotional Materiality: Surabhi Saraf, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Marcus Brittain Fleming, and Mariah Hill. They will present a series of activations, themed “Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO)”:
WORKSHOP / PERFORMANCE
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO): ATTUNEMENT 🌊🌿🍵👂🏿🌲🌀?
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 3:45 PM
Connecticut College Arboretum, by Buck Lodge
Join us at the Arboretum to explore how attunement can act as a balm to nourish a grounded connection with technology. Attunement is the act of bringing gentle awareness to our bodies, feelings, and thoughts in real and online spaces. Through herbal remedies, movement exercises, and play, participants will explore exactly what we are missing when we are missing out.
WORKSHOP / PERFORMANCE
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO): LISTENING
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 5:30-6:30 PM, doors close 5:40 PM
Myers Studio, Crozier-Williams Student Center
What is the sound of joy? What does fear sound like?
Can we listen to them with our fingers, our feet, our whole body?
Explore listening as a tool for sensing into the present moment. Inspired by the practice of “Quantum Listening” by Pauline Oliveros, this participatory performance harnesses sound, projections, and gentle movement to invite the audience to engage in deep attentive whole body listening as a form of love in action
“Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously—changing and being changed by the listening.” —Pauline Oliveros
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO)
Evans Hall, Cummings Art Center
Friday, November 11th, 9:45 AM
Friday, November 11th, 9:45am
In this talk, the members of the CEM will help reframe the idea of FOMO (fear of missing out), transforming FOMO from a shameful reaction into an indicator of our most vital needs: to be validated, to be loved, to belong. CEM believes that we can morph FOMO into something more nourishing and generative that centers care and connection. We hope that this shift helps attendees navigate the pitfalls of online spaces in healthier ways.
Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) is a collective of multidisciplinary artists and researchers who examine the algorithmic conditioning of emotions and its effects on our bodies and beliefs. We devise strategies in the form of workshops, study circles, toolkits, rituals etc. for holistic thinking, feeling, and acting in the digital era.
Our work is grounded in building collective knowledge and discourses by taking research outside of the lab, and bringing it to our communities. We foster nonlinear, nonbinary, critical research and creative thinking-through-making. With a focus on emotional health, intelligence, and imagination, we envision new kinds of affective relationships with technology that pave pathways for interdependent and pluralist futures.
CEM embraces the Blob and its fluid potential as an organizing principle. We morph, shift, and adopt as needed. CEM is organized by Surabhi Saraf, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Caroline Sinders, Marcus Fleming and Mariah Hill.
COMMISSIONS
Anonymous Ensemble: “Llontop”
Augmented Reality Installation & Live Theatrical Performance
Palmer Auditorium at the Athey Center for Performance & Research, Connecticut College
Installation: Friday, November 11, 1:30-3:30PM & Saturday, November 12, 2-4PM
Performance in collaboration with Quechua poet Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco: Saturday, November 12, 4:30PM
Bring your smartphones and headphones (some will be available on-site)
Llontop is a project that centers Quechua voices, employing cutting edge machine learning to activate family heirloom objects using augmented reality with podcast-style audio content specific to the individual gaze of each audience member. The poems are performed using Anonymous Ensemble’s signature “live film” aesthetic with multiple camera feeds, live projections, and a simultaneous live stream of the performance to online audiences throughout the world.
Anonymous Ensemble is a group of artists that explore innovative technologies and performance practices in order to create new theater and live film; it was founded in 2001 and has created new work every year since. We have presented work throughout New York City and the United States, as well as Greece, England, Scotland, Norway, Germany, and Australia. We value creating community wherever we are and we ask how the audience can be co-creators of each performance event.
Irma Álvarez-Ccoscco is a Quechua poet from Apurímac Perú, a song-poem (taki) performer, a language activist supporting the use of indigenous languages in software environments, a translator and an educator.
Llontop was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, by Net/TEN, and by the A.R.T./New York Small Theatres Fund.
Ensemble Pamplemousse: “Envelop In In”
Live + Robotic Concert
Myers Studio, Crozier-Williams Student Center
Saturday, November 12, 8:00PM
A composition driven by mechanical instruments constructed by the company, which are activated by sound produced by the other two members of the ensemble. The compositional material explodes the various implications of “shadow”. The piece both reflects and enhances the musical form and content, by personifying the computer and digitizing the humans.
Composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse was founded in 2003 to provide a focal point for like-minded creators with a thirst for sonic exploration. The ensemble is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, emergent from training in disparate musical fields. Their collective love for the exquisite in all sonic realms leads the ensemble to persistently discover new vistas of sound at the frayed edges of dissective instrumental performance technique. Compositions aggregate each member’s unique virtuosic talents into extraordinary magical moments. In the flexible moments of performance, the ensemble weaves together shapes of resonance, clusters of glitch, skitters of hyper action, and masses of absurdity into impeccable structures of unified beauty.
Joel Ong: “In Silence”
Sound Installation
CONTACT exhibition, Cummings Arts Center Gallery, Connecticut College
November 10 – December 11
Mon-Fri: 9 AM-5 PM, Sat-Sun: 1-4 PM
A sculptural installation using video, sound, wind, water and bone-conduction to convey stories of migration and the Caribbean diaspora of Toronto.
Joel Ong is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment. His recent works explore the visibility and audibility of ambient phenomena with a particular focus on the wind and the atmospheric microbiome.
