[ISEA2011] Workshop: Camille Baker – MINDtouch: Mobile Video Creativity

Workshop Statement

Come get involved in a participatory performance art project using mobile video with Canadian media artist and curator, Camille Baker. She will guide you through a series of activities using and creating personal abstract videos to explore ways to communicate visually, gesturally and non-verbally repurposing the mobile device’s means of communication and expression. Camille Baker will facilitate participants to explore embodied visual expression through mobile video practice developed from MINDtouch : Embodied Transference, mobile video research workshops for SMARTlab PhD project (2007-2010). This workshop explores mobile video/media on phones for their immediacy, low quality – imperfectness, but with spontaneity that is at the speed of thought – with its rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas, flashes and clashes of images and emotion, layering of meaning and stream of consciousness and equivalent and/or simulation of telepathy and collective (if chaotic) intelligence. The participants invited to participate in the video experience will explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional/affective senses and dream states, as well as embodiment and communication, using mobile media tools to express themselves non-verbally. Participants are guided through exercises to create intimate instant video expressions to explore ways to communicate visually, gesturally and non-verbally, repurposing the mobile device’s means of communication and connection. Participants are asked to bring their own video phone or camera phones and an open mind. Participants in a group are led through a 10 minute meditation/guided visualization/exploration of senses as preparation. Each participant then takes their video phone and is given 3-4 separate activities to record, based on themes or goals provided, to represent certain types of internal emotions, thoughts, perceptions and sensations.

  • Camille Baker has a fascination with all things emotional, embodied, felt, sensed, the visceral, physical, relational, and participatory, using video, communication devices and biofeedback. She has been on a continuous quest to work with new technologies, expressive methods, via art and performance, in order to find new ways to connect people with each other, over distance, in better and more embodied, emotional ways. Her recent work involves a recently completed PhD project creating social mobile VJing called MINDtouch through theSMARTlab at the University of East London (now moved to University College of Dublin), as part of research on Liveness and Presence in mobile performance media. Her other research interests include: mobile media and video art, live cinema, performance and interactive media, responsive environments, media art installation, telematics, new media curating and networked communities. Camille is also an artist-performer/researcher/ curator within various art forms: interactive and performance installation, music composition and performance, video art, web animation, and experience design. Her background includes: music composition and performance, new media installation, online video and animation, media art instruction web design /development, documentary production, visual arts curating and sculpture and modern dance performance. She was the Executive Director/Curator of The Escape Artists Society in Vancouver, Canada; Lead Curator, Conference Director and Co-Performance Art Curator for the New Forms Festival in Vancouver and editor-in-chief of an online pop-culture relationship support magazine – Tales of Slacker Bonding (2000-2003). Camille has presented at the DHRA Conference 2010, Brunel University, London, Sept 5-8, 2010; EVA Conference 2010 London July 2010, TEXTURES, SLSAe 6th Annual Conference, Riga, Latvia, June 15-20, 2010; ISEA2009 Belfast August 25-30, 2009; Performing Presence Conference, Exeter, March 27-20 2009; Kinetica and London Science Museum’s: Man and Machine Series, November 2008; MobileFest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 2008; FilMobile Conference and Exhibition, London, April 2008; MobileFest London December 2007; Cultural Studies NOW Conference 2007, University East London; Knowledge London 2007, University of Westminster, London; The New Forms Festival 2006: TRANSFORMATIONS, ArtCamp: un-Conference on Art, Vancouver, Canada; The Planetary Collegium’s Consciousness Reframed 2004: Qi and Complexity Conference, Beijing, China, November 2004; The Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2003, Melbourne, Australia; SXSW 2002 Interactive Award Finalist in Austin, Texas, 2002. swampgirl67.net