Collaboration

COLLABORATION

Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO)

Participatory Performance, Workshop, and Keynote Address with Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM)
The Ammerman Center Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology,
Connecticut College, New London, CT, Nov. 10-11, 2022

http://artsandtechsymposium.digital.conncoll.edu/keynote-commissions/

The Ammerman Center 2022 Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology will be held at Connecticut College in New London, CT, November 10-12, 2022. The aim of the Symposium, now in its 36th year, is to create an inclusive forum for multidisciplinary dialogue at the intersection of arts, technology, and contemporary culture in a variety of formats. This year’s theme is CONTACT: In the contemporary vocabulary, “contact” is something to be avoided in physical interactions or something perhaps just out of reach in our remote relationships with others. Contact contains the promise of new and continued engagement within communities, among disparate institutions and so-called disciplines.

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.

Images from "Inter-blobbing Towards the Love of Missing Out" in collaboration with Surabhi Saraf (Visual + Sound), Photo by Connecticut College

WORKSHOP
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO): ATTUNEMENT

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.

PERFORMANCE
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO): LISTENING

A collective journey into “Inter-blobbing Towards the Love of Missing Out.” We offer this movement as an embodied antidote for when an obscured sense of fear starts crawling inside, crowding our sense of self-worth with messy feelings, clouding our pathway towards love.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Towards the Love of Missing Out (LOMO)

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.

Photo by Surabhi Saraf

Towards Pigeonology: Flocks as Emergent Turn in Narrative

In collaboration with Kevin Sweet (kimandsweet.com / sweetandkim.com), 2020 - Ongoing

Video Performance Lecture, Sound by Chris Corrente, 2022

"Towards Pigeonology" is a multimedia performance project developed by Kevin Sweet and Laura Hyunjhee Kim. Their performances, workshops and performance lectures serve as a speculative methodology that disorients and reconfigures popular representations of (non)human entities as a means to recognize their inseparable role as active participants and witness to anthropocentric narratives.

Iterations of this practice-based research project has been presented in exhibitions and academic conferences. Exhibitions include Flocks as Emergent Turn in Narrative at Udstillingsstedet M.I.S., Jutland Art Academy, Aarhus, Denmark (01.21-02.02.2022); Martha: A Pigeonological Study for an Endling at Matters of Lives, Meta Forte, Venice, Italy (09.03-09.28.2022), and Matter of Pigeons at Future Forging: Mythos of the Cybernaut, CU Denver Experience Gallery, Denver, Colorado, USA (09.17-10.31.2022). We have presented our work at "The Art and Science of Species Revival Symposum" at the Leverhulme Center for Anthropocene Biodiversity, The University of York, UK (12.14.2022) and will be presented in the panel Hybridity and Praxis: The Artist as Researcher in the 111th College Art Association annual conference, New York, USA (02.16.2023). More information is available at kimandsweet.com

Access the Exhibition
Access the Publication
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EXHIBITION + PERFORMANCE + RESIDENCIES :
The Art and Science of Species Revival, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, The University of York, UK, 2022
Matter of Pigeons, CU Experience Gallery, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, USA, 2022
Matters of Lives, Venice Art Projects, Venice, Italy, 2022
Flocks as Emergent Turn in Narrative, Jutland Art Academy, Århus, Denmark, 2021-2022

Beyond All Polarities, We Are _____

Participatory Performance Installation with Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box,
4–7 p.m., Thursday, July 7, 2022

sfmoma.org/event/beyond-all-polarities-we-are-_____/

Surabhi Saraf and Laura Hyunjhee Kim of the Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) invite you to a multisensorial experience, Beyond All Polarities, We Are _____.
“Feeling-through-sensing into your body, we invite you to slow down. Make your emotions tangible into a blobby sense of interbeing. In this feelosophical journey, we will melt into a vibrant portrait of togetherness. We explore our collective identities as peoples living in uncertain times. We ask ‘who we are’ beyond what we (dis)like, beyond categories of on/offline affinities, and beyond our fears and anxieties.”

In collaboration with Bay Area artist Ashwini Bhat, Saraf and Kim invite you to a special immersive interactive performance installation spoken through presence, embodied through practice, and experienced through participation.

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 for holistic thinking, feeling, and acting in the digital era. 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.

(Time-lapse Documentation)

Traveling 2046

Video, 3min 13sec, In collaboration with Chris Corrente, 2022

Traveling 2046 is a performative utterance and personal eulogy that takes the form of a music video artwork. Emblazoned with nonstop prose, hypnotic hooks, and spoken words stitched by means of dream logic, the piece advances without a moment of visual pause or aural silence; relentlessly as time itself. Hyper-stimulating sequences of colorful images generated by 3D body scanners and human/nonhuman AI artists express the temperament of (non)human bodies deeply entangled with the sensorial experiences of ecological, technological, and biopsychosocial time.The project centers the artist’s body as a diffractive prism, a site for living-research that urges nonhuman bodies-to-bodies to see with and through others; sensate, harmonize, shimmer, radiate, as a means to co-create narratives of co-existence. Would expanding our sense-abilities allow us to attune to the (un)forgotten and (un)seen embodied memories of the past and present? What yet-to-be imagined stories of the future are we haunted by and what actions can we take in the real-time-now to co-survive with our awakening apparitions in the anthropocene?
Audiovisual texts in the video were partially sourced and inspired by the works of fellow artists and 1980s-2002s popular music and television, including Japanese pop artist Utada Hikaru’s Traveling (2002).

With appreciation to cited works (in order of appearance):
Utada Hikaru “Traveling” (2002)
Buckminster Fuller as quoted by Incubus “New Skin” (1998)
Thomas Riccio “Blue Jelly” (2022)
John Pomara “Pool Party” (2021-2022)
NBC “Quantum Leap” (1989-1993)

EXHIBITION + SCREENINGS:

Aurora Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA [April, 2022]
Athens Digital Art Festival, Athens, Greece [May, 2022]
The Theatre of Digital Arts, Dubai, UAE [May-Sept, 2022]
New Media Caucus Symposium & Exhibition, Virginia Tech, Richmond, VA [9/30/2022-10/2/2022]
Convoy, High Beams, RMCAD, Denver [8/20/2022]
Transformative Power of Art Journal on individual transformation through the arts [Fall publication]
International Forum for Performance Art (IFPA), Drama, Greece. [9/16-9/18/2022]
IV FIVA SPMAV 2022 International Videoart Festival, Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel) &
Corridor 14 and Leopoldo Gotuzzo Art Museum Pelotas (MALG), RS Brazil. [10/3/2022-10/9/2022]

Blue Jelly

Assistant Director, Projections Designer, and Performer (Vurt)

Original performance written and directed by Thomas Riccio.
8:00 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17–Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022,
University Theatre, The University of Texas at Dallas.

Photo by Charissa Menken

"Welcome to Blue Jelly. Like reality, the performance is an ongoing experiment searching for understanding and stability. The events of
our last few years have been monumental, mythic and planetary in dimension, intensive, challenging, accelerating and often overwhelming in new and unexpected ways. We are participant observers, capable and self-aware, engaged yet haplessly stumbling, adjusting and adapting to so many unprecedented twists and turns of potentially catastrophic events. Our world is upending, provoking questioning and reevaluation.

Another way of being is in the process of emergence. How do we respond?
We are foggy and ADHD frantic, resorting to a cacophony of tired tropes, savoring distractions, sensual pleasures, mindless entertainments of war, gore and violence, fantasy projections of aliens, religious salvations, authoritarian delusions, and the momentary comforts of social media. Fragmented,
jagged and incomplete narratives are the way of the world, recombing and remixing disconnected remains searching for a response. Our thinking reflects the world, hyper-aware, pattern recognizing processor of a jumble. The narrative of Blue Jelly is as disjointed as Instagram, Tik-Tok and Twitter, offering sound bite revelations of puzzled, desperate expressions of our metaphysical moment that we must put together.

Blue Jelly is an organic entity. A symbolic planetary mind-body feeling and form of the collective us. Humans are no longer the center of the world but only one among others, including flora, fauna, environment, climate, ancestors and spirits is what the Blue Jelly offers. The Blue Jelly, inspired by the jellyfish—one of the first living organisms on earth—is the forgotten, communal us that has floated, impassive and constant on the waves of time and space. It has absorbed and holds all planetary events that have been and ever will be. Now the Blue Jelly, like our world, is full, overstuffed and collapsing under its own weight. Is this a massive déjà vu? Are we at the end of one history and the beginning of another? Are we at some willfully suicidal end or amidst a process? Do we ignore and resist or transcend into another way of being?" — Thomas Riccio, Writer / Director’s Note, 2022

Embodied Emotional Resilience

Pioneer Works, NY
(This workshop was rescheduled from 3/23 to 5/18. This class will take place via Zoom)
6:30 PM 8:30 PM, Monday, May 18, 2020

In a techno-capitalist economy that thrives on the quantification of nature and computation of our innermost lives, we ask: What are the gaps between how machines read our emotions and how emotions actually feel in our bodies?

In this workshop, we will collectively explore the emotional resilience of the body towards platforms that surveil, manipulate, and automate the human experience. To do so, we will delve into the emotional materiality of the body by using “the blob” metaphor as a lens and a tool to investigate and appreciate the complexities of human emotion. Feeling and sensing through a series of choreographed explorations and discussions, we will create and hold a space for blobby emotivity to emerge—an embodied experience where we embrace the inexplicable and the non-quantifiable, the slow and messy.

The workshop will be led by Surabhi Saraf and Laura Hyunjhee Kim and is part of Fruits of the Pluralist program series at PIONEER WORKS. Encouraging non-binary perception and embracing contradiction broadens communication to the world and to ourselves. Would it be possible for the real and the imaginary, start and finish, the articulate and the inarticulable, to not be oppositional? Fruits of the Pluralist is a program series that explores technological systems and practices that recognize many different kinds of identities, structures, and forms of communication. The series will showcase workshops and activations centered in spatiality and non-binary complexity.

For more information, readings, and related materials, please visit https://www.are.na/fruits-of-the-pluralist.

Sharing Turtle

Project-based multimodal collaborations with libi rose striegl, 2018 - Current

Projects by sharing turtle, 2018 - ongoing

sharing turtle is the brainchild of art-trepreneurs Laura Kim and libi rose. With a thoughtful yet irreverent attitude towards the modern cyborgian state, Laura and libi interrogate the fragile balances maintaining symbiotic human-tech relationships and investigate human and computational behavior. Incorporating critique and interpretations of contemporary thinkers, modern scientific and technological advancements, and engaging with the vast potential of the post-digital art world, their collaborative work embraces (departs from?! And defies?) both the cynical and the hopeful.

Disrupting and reimagining technology-driven modern lifestyles through subversive satirical humor and multifaceted means of creative expression, the collaborative duo’s culminating projects challenge conversations around the Next Big Thing and intends to add a humanistic touch and dosage of sincere awareness to the hype fused technocultural landscape.

www.sharing turtle.com

we solve technological solutions
and make disrupting disruption easy

"no home," Electrofringe and Electrocities, Sydney, Australia, 2019

http://nohome.sharingturtle.com/noHome/noHome.html

A Prairie Dog Companion, Boulder Public Library, Boulder, CO, 2018

EXHIBITION + RESIDENCIES :

Electrofringe, Sydney, Australia, 2019
ElectroCities, Online Digital Residency, 2019
sharing turtle, Welcome to My Homepage, Digital Artist Residency, 2018
PODS by sharing turtle, Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX, 2018
A Prairie Dog Companion, Canyon Gallery, Boulder Public Library, Boulder, CO, 2018 - 2019

Promontory Project: A Case Study I 2018

Partial NEST grant awardee for project in collaboration with human-computer interaction researcher Jen Liu

Promontory Project: A Case Study on the Annihilation of Time and Space is a joint collaboration between multimedia artist Laura Hyunjhee Kim and human-computer interaction researcher Jen Liu that re-examines the visual, cultural, and social history of the technological wild west. Golden Spike National Historic Site, located in Promontory Summit, marks the point where the Transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Bridging the American East and West Coast across mountains, prairies, deserts and forest, this railroad marks an “annihilation of space and time,” a popular catchphrase from the 19th century used to describe how new communication and transportation technologies, such as the railway and telegraph, can rapidly influence a society.

Essay and artifacts on view at NEST Studio for the Arts, Boulder, CO, 2018

Meta-Force 4

Collaboration with Peter Max Lawrence
Video(Single-Channel), 4min 47secs, 2015

Meta-Force is the resulting documentation of a spontaneous and impulsive video/performance collaboration between the artists Peter Max Lawrence & Laura Hyunjhee Kim. It is infused with several of the duo's shared inspirations from pop-culture, high/low art and academic decompression. The want and need to create a Saturday morning cartoon with cocktails resulted in this project which is currently being expanded in to other episodes that will later be consolidated for a feature length video.

Facial Media Network

Live interactive performance with spectators accompanied by video projection and sound
In collaboration with Chris Corrente,
The Sub, San Francisco CA, 2014
Documentation by Alex Ember and Daniel Morgan

Art World

Video (single-channel), 2min 32sec, 2011
In Collaboration with Chris Corrente

In the vein DIY retro-MTV-kitsch music videos, the piece collapses what is perceived as hi-brow and lo-brow culture. With the synergy of lo-fi pop and colorful visuals, the work borrows tropes from 80s campy video production aesthetics and pays an irreverent homage the Art world.