The Thinking Through The Body research project was conceived by George Khut in response to the Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Arts Office ‘Art Lab‘ initiative. Art Lab aims to nurture “rigorous experimentation and collaboration between artists from multiple disciplines to explore new artistic practices” with an emphasis on “…innovation, risk taking, artistic integrity and the creation of new ideas”. We used this funding to support three workshop events (14 days, spread over one year), culminating in the ‘Sensorium Gymnasium’ open studio event at Performance Space, Redfern.
We are deeply grateful to the Australia Council for the Arts for creating a support structure that has allowed us to pay attention to the relationship between art, technology and the body in our collective and individual practices.
Follow the links to access photos, transcripts, videos and sound recordings…
Mike Leggett recorded these interviews with us, for The Bundanon Trust while we were setting up for the ‘Sensorium Gymnasium’ at Performance Space, in July 2009. Interwoven with documentation from our Bundanon residency-workshop, we discuss the project aims, the influence of the Bundanon residency and Feldenkrais Method on our process, and the transformative impact of this project on our individual research practices.
You can read transcripts of the full interviews here
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About the ‘ArtLab’ workshops
Thinking Through the Body – has been a conversation between eight people over one year. The long term, ‘slow release’ structure of the project supported a very high quality of reflection, and the workshop model of skill exchange between peers from different disciplines enabled us to evolve a shared language for our research into body-focussed interactive art aesthetics, over the course of the three workshops.
The opportunity to have such a rich and complex conversation, supported through hands-on experimentation and sharing is a rare and valuable thing. The project has been a transformative experience for all members of the group, allowing us to progress our respective understandings of what we are working with as makers of interactive art experiences, and explore new ways of working with these types of body-experience.
The project has supported the development of new methods for generating, exhibiting and evaluating body-focussed interactive artworks – methods that take as their starting point our individual felt experience of ourselves, and (of special importance) our capacity to train our attention to these often foundation-level categories of being and action: standing, lying, walking, being-in-a-place, receiving touch etc.
Being open to the possibility of having no ‘finished work’ at the end – enabled all members of the group to engage in a much deeper and more open-minded form of enquiry into our respective understandings of body-experience in art. Workshop #2 (Bundanon) provided a crucial ‘Blue Sky’ space for each of us to ask questions, take risks, and experience new ways of perceiving and reflecting on our bodies and practices. Central to this research has been a differentiation between working with “the body” (as a concept, and external appearance) and “my body” – the body as a felt experience, contingent on a combination of internal and external factors (skeletal structure, posture, nervous disposition, environmental factors etc.).
The sensitivity we where able to cultivate – to our felt-experience of our bodies and situation over the course of the three workshops, laid the foundations for the prototype experiences and methods that where developed and tested at the ‘Sensorium Gymnasium’ open-studio events at Performance Space, July 2009.
The Workshop Structure
The structure of the Art Lab workshops was devised by curator and inter-disciplinary facilitator Lizzie Muller. Lizzie’s approach emphasised a peer-to-peer exchange of methods and approaches across disciplines, that drew on the special skills and experiences of each participant.
Each member of the group led at least one half-day practical workshop, introducing the rest of the group to a particular method, processes or technology that was closely connected to their approach to the body. Each of these workshops concluded with a facilitated discussion that enabled us to consider issues and possibilities raised – from the multiple disciplinary perspectives that each of us brought to the project.
This collaborative process of exchange and evaluation supported the development of a shared vocabulary and set of experiences, that we could refer to in our ongoing correspondences – an important ingredient for interdisciplinary collaborations where the meaning of a word or phrase can differ radically from one discipline to another.
We often commenced each day with a 30-45 minute Feldenkrais “Awareness Through Movement” lesson, that served to bring our attention back into our own bodies providing a sensitivity to our lived experience of subtle movement and musculo-skeletal orgainsation that we could then apply to the workshop explorations.