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17th Conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR)

Have you tried prompting your body? Attentive body as a site of intermodal interpretation and subjective response

Presented by: Renata Pekowska
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 3:10pm - 3:50pm (40 mins)
Presenters
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Have you tried prompting your body?  Attentive body as a site of intermodal inte
Abstract
I aim to present and discuss emergent understandings of my PhD research project which uses shared situations of responsive drawing as epistemic spaces of emergent knowledges and sites and acts of primary, creative, joint attention.
By inviting participants to join a workshop session, I would like to initiate a discussion on the possible limits of creative possibilities of AI, using embodiment as the lacking element identified both by N. Katherine Hayles and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
During the session we will use mark making and its responsive crossmodal potential as a process within a lived, situated, spatial, bodily experience. I will present my processes of ‘prompting’ the body with verbal scripts, sensory presences, and space-or time-experience-related descriptions, revealing the body as a medium of transmission, activated as an imperfect conductor and a site of crossmodal interface. The workshop will use the marked space and surfaces as scripts for a performative interpretation.
The performative workshop will interrogate a shared group situation of co-envolvement and togetherness, as enabling the processes of discovery and crossmodal bodily interpretations where subjective responses and perspectives are possible outside of the scale of attention economy models and algorithmically generated ‘discorrelated’ illustrations of a ‘gaze from nowhere’.
The session will aim to show that the in-between spheres of intermodal description and response can generate critical reflection, lived discoveries, through being acts of ‘setting of the scene’ and ‘getting into it’ of primary embodied attention and rearranging of perceptual attentional habits. It will also aim to reiterate the proposed possibility of practicing and learning perceptual attention through shared acts of attention, and further explore attention as a non-binary concept which points to interconnected realities of experience and its representation.
Biography
Renata Pękowska is a visual artist and researcher based in Dublin, currently a Government of Ireland Scholar PhD Researcher at TU Dublin. Her background includes architectural studies, BDes in craft design (NCAD), MA ACW (NCAD), MA in UI/UX design (TU Dublin), she is also a trained shadow puppeteer. Her research interests cover a wide range of visual culture related topics, including book arts, light installations, digital and analogue audio-visual performance and traditional crafts. Her current research project interrogates shared drawing situations of sensory response.