Reconfigured Vision – workshop

27 June 2017

The White Building
Sun 25 June, 1 - 5pm (book here)
Tue 27 June, 7 - 9.30pm (book here)
£7 con. £4

Active bodies, difficult objects.

Join artist in residence Ilona Sagar for a co-inquiry, taking the question ‘what do objects sound like?’ as its starting point.

Working in collaboration with OxSight and Torr Vision Lab, organisations who are engineering devises to assist users who are registered legally blind and Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab, Human Experiences & Design Group, Ilona Sagar will investigate our relationship to assistive technologies, asking how can we safeguard agency and subjective experience? How do the devices we use dictate our shared environment?

Participants will be invited to imagine new ways of rendering our physical environment and translate the objects it contains into sonic semantics. Testing wearable vision enhancement tools will act as a catalyst for a much wider exploration into the politics and language of assistive technologies.

The idea that bodies are either enhanced or normalised is an uncomfortable perspective of wearable technologies and raises the question, what is a good body? To what extent are we a product of our ‘body capital’, labour and efficiency?

Elements of the workshop will be filmed.

If you have any access requirements, please email lou@spacestudios.org.uk to let us know.

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Ilona Sagar has a practice spanning performance, film and assemblage that responds to the social, historical and cultural contexts of private and public space. A significant aspect of her practice is the broad cross-disciplinary dialogue generated through collaboration with a range of art and scientific disciplines; including dance, architecture and neurology. Her work explores the link between language, surface, technologies and the body through our increasingly mediated encounters in social, political and experiential space. Illusion and material [dis]honesty set the stage for works which seek to seduce, alluding to something familiar yet other.