This workshop was rescheduled from 3/23 to 5/18. This class will take place via Zoom.

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.

This workshop will be led by former Tech Resident and Founder of The Centre for Emotional Materiality Surabhi Saraf and Centre for Emotional Material member Laura Hyunjhee Kim.

Price: Free ($10 Suggested Donation)

Date: The workshop is a one-time course meeting on May 18 from 6:30-8:30PM.

Audience: Open to all.

Materials: Materials will be provided.

Surabhi Saraf is a media artist and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology through multimedia works. Saraf is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award, the Djerassi Resident Artist Award, and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke and Hosfelt Gallery. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Asian Art Museum. Her videos have been shown at Times Square, Blanton Museum, and the Hunter Museum of American Art among others.

Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a Korean-American multimedia artist who contemplates and reimagines digitally constructed on/offline (non)human experiences. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Blending and bending pop cultural tropes that playfully engage with the amateur aesthetics of the internet, she utilizes consumer electronics in production and draws inspiration from viral memes, lo-fi pop music, narrative found-footage film, and kitschy low-budget commercials. In recent projects, she thematically researches emerging trends and patterns in consumer-grade technology to surface (non)human dreams and desires that shape modern values. She is the founding director of Synthetic Empathic Intelligent Companion Artefacts (SEICA) Human Interaction Labs and the author of Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs (to be published by The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms in summer of 2019).

Kim has shown work in numerous on/offline exhibition spaces, screenings, and festivals around the world including the Internet Archive, Harvestworks, and the Streaming Museum among others. Her work has appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, KQED, Daily Serving, San Francisco Chronicle, NewHive, MutualArt, The Creators Project, Living Room Light Exchange publications, and Lungs Project.

Kim received a B.S. in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.F.A. from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information. Kim resides in the U.S. and frequents South Korea.

About Fruits of the Pluralist
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.