[-empyre-] Welcome to the March Discussion on -empyre-:"Into the Midst: Deterritorialized Collaboration in Technological Spaces.”

[Lichty, Patrick]

Welcome to the March Discussion on -empyre-:"Into the Midst: Deterritorialized Collaboration in Technological Spaces.”

Throughout 2012, culminating in a residency at the Senselab at Concordia University Montreal and the Societe des Arts Technologiques’ SAToDome, researchers of the global Senselab network met online to discuss, situate, and strategize methodologies of unstructured collaboration and non-hierarchical discourse.  The culmination of these discussions, through the SenseLab hub, located and online events was a two-week workshop consisting of loose groups of performers, theorists, technologists, interventionists, and mediators.  These groups worked and disseminated their practice-based research to explore the potential of the situated body as site of discourse when placed within a 45-foot diameter, 190-degree radius, 8-channel sound, and 18-channel video dome.  

During the residency we met every day, venturing into the parks and streets, macramé-bombing, feeding the homeless, dancing, twirling, creating 360-degree videos, panoramas, scanning each other, and roaming the streets of Montreal.  It was the epitome of the necessarily collaborative nature of New Media.

But in the end, we had questions to its success.  About an hour into the SAToDome performance, we shut down the dancing and interactions with the public to have a discussion of why we were doing this and what the public thought.  In creating reflective texts afterwards, there were a multitude of opinions on the residency and event from a grand success to colossal failure in our intent.  But then, wasn’t it Deleuze who said that failures were often in themselves the greatest masterpieces?

This month, I have invited my friends and colleagues from the “Into the Midst” residency to take positions, present propositions, engage situations, and in general describe our processes and experiences in creating the residency and its performative public event.

For this month, we will have four teams of two with a large cloud of tactical interveners to discuss our process and experience.  A warning – as we explored anarchic modes of collaboration, the topics mentioned are intended as touchpoints for lines of flight generated by the discussion.  As with my last topic of Glitch, I tend to like generally unruly groups.

The weekly topics/respondents are:
1: Patrick Lichty & Erin Manning – Entering the Midst: Formations and Collaborations
2: Charlotte Farrell & Hannah James: Emergent Networks & Ontological Macrame
3: Toni Pape, Alana Thain & Brian Massumi: Decision without Deliberation/Affective Self-Organization
4: Bianca Scilar, Mayra Morales,  Zila Muniz: The Dance of Collaboration and the Dome as Situation

With “Free Radicals” - 
Andrew Goodman,
Nathaniel Stern
Annette Svaneklink

Keywords:

Collaboration

Affect

Public Practice

Technology and Performance

Strategies

Practice-Based Research

Ludic Research

Activating

Landing