Workshop Statement
[Remark: the Workshop was XXLD]
Description: The current corporate technology fervour over wearable technology that collects everyone’s intimate body data, under the pretence of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time to ask critical questions and raise concerns around the ethics of corporate ownership of this data for a consumerism and surveillance agenda.
As part of a larger collaboration by the authors, this workshop aims to draw the performance community into the development, evolution of, and conversation around wearable technology, data collection ethics. It is meant to bring performers and researchers together to develop methods of using both commercial and handmade wearable sensing and smart textiles-based devices that transmit physiological data, to create unique interactive performances. It also aims to engage performers actively in exploring ways in which wearable technologies might enhance performance, while making playful, challenging and thought-provoking performance works.
This workshop is an all day workshop with a focus on the performance making process, while incorporating physiological data into the final performance, as a way to express identity. It will feature exercises with performers, and have them work with pre-created DIY soft circuit sensors, as well as a selection of commercial devices, in order to move or control an output, such as sound, visuals or video. The day will be organised around introductions to wearable technology, improvisation activities, and exercises to enable performers to create interactivity with devices and sensors, and a short devising activity to allow participants to perform their own ideas.
- Camille Baker, University for the Creative Arts, UK
- Kate Sicchio, Assistant Professor of Dance and Media Technologies, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. Kate Sicchio works at the interface of technology and performance. By opening a dialogue between how people move and how this may change by engaging with the digital, she aims to create choreography, performative scores, video, programming languages and hacking methodologies. Her work has been shown in galleries, on stage and in more unconventional sites, in the form of installations and performances. Most recently she has been working with wearable technology, live coding and technology as an intervention in the choreographic process. Her work has been has been shown in Philadelphia, New York City, Canada, Germany, Australia, Belgium, and the UK at venues such as Banff New Media Institute (Canada), FoAM (Brussels, Belgium) and Arnolfini Arts Centre (UK). blog.sicchio.com