"Bodies of Color"

 

 

A hands-on workshop for all those interested in sensorial experiences and performances in digital works and augmented realities
created through computing and media technologies.

 

For this workshop, Birringer suggests a reflection on the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (a recent retrospective was shown at the Houstion MFA and at Tate Modern, June-September 2007):

"Oiticica moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called 'Quasi-Cinema' (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of Vivencia and the Supra-Sensorial)."

"The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are 'wearables' (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables and close-to-the-skin interfaces."

For this workshop, we invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by playing with fabrics and cameras, self-portraits and animations of others, wearing cloth and special garments with sensors, touching upon the erotics of materials and feedbacks, interacting in a tactile sensorial manner within the mediated environment (images, sounds, colours).