CartCopresence Research Laboratory Instructor: Christopher DanielProgram: History, Design & Worldmaking, Art & Curatorial PracticeCredit(s): 1Date: June 14th, 21st, 28th, July 5th.Time: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: Where are you, right now? Where are you present?
Our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our data: where are they —where are we— present at any given moment? On whose territory —on land, on paper, on servers— are we living our lives and how does that serve us? This Seminar is designed to be as much about those who attend it as the content that is delivered. These gatherings are as much about the physical places from which we join the calls and the physical routes that carry our data between us as they are about the ways in which we co-create places online.
The Seminar is conceived as the establishment of a collaborative lab for collective investigation into presence and co-presence. Our focus will be on a more intentional and considerate relationship with our data, our places, our fellow humans and the other-than-human. While for most of our history, a human individual could be in one place at one time, our ability to extend and expand our presence has grown exponentially in recent centuries. By engaging with the histories and affordances of the social and technical systems that facilitate our meeting from diverse locations around the world, we will explore our relationships and agency —as designers, as worldmakers— within them.
Session 1: Presence & consciousness. We will begin where we are, both in physical and virtual space. We will investigate the relationships between our locations around the world, the locations of our data and the platforms and jurisdictions within which we are resident.
Session 2: Gathering, arrangement & copresence. With a greater consciousness of where we are all reside, we will look at how we gather. For most of human history, gathering and separation has been in physical space. What can we learn from centuries of evolution of gathering places in order to better inform the ways we design and gather in virtual places?
Session 3: Collective inquiry into future presence. Where might this take us next? What might be better than a videocall? What can we test right now? With a two week gap between sessions 2 & 3, there will have been the possibility for group or individual investigation into the topics above.
Session 4: Space for emergence. The intention for this session is that its content and format will have primarily emerged from the research and experimentation in previous sessions. We may be on a videocall; it may be an audio call as we walk outside; we may gather in a virtual world of our own devising.
IMAGE: Paul Klee, In Angels Care, 1931
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