Documentation from the [Re]Mapping perception workshop at LJMU 2 May 2019

Here is the original invitation…

A workshop for artists/researchers engaging in a wide range of practice-based and artistic research methodologies. It aims to explore interdisciplinary methods through a series of provocations in embodied multisensory experience, designed to enhance our perception and self-awareness. The workshop provides an open space for participants from different fields to meet, communicate findings, share paradigms, and explore the value of sensory perception and awareness in our research. It also offers an opportunity to meet Madeline Schwartzman and gain insight into the works discussed in her new book See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded. Her public lecture follows the workshop [ Places can be booked here https://www.eventbrite.com/o/antony-hall-19862154602 ] [Re]Action Lab is an interdisciplinary artistic research project by Antony Hall [MMU] in partnership with BEAM Lab, and FACT at Manchester Metropolitan University. [Re]Action Lab combines methods from contemporary art, and experimental psychology, exploring ways in which we can use multisensory perceptual illusion as a means to enhance bodily awareness. 

This workshop is supported by NWCDTP (North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership) in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), BEAM Lab, Manchester Metropolitan University and Liverpool John Moores University.

The workshop:
Antony Hall [MMU] and Dr Elizabeth Lewis (BEAM Lab) will begin the morning session exploring the possibilities of remapping, enhancing and modifying our sensory perception. Hands-on demonstrations and activities will act as provocations to stimulate discussion. Teresa Brayshaw will demonstrate methods of enhancing self-awareness through movement and bodily perception. By heightening our awareness of movement, breathing and posture, the Feldenkrais Method brings us closer to realising our full human potential. Recent studies have employed similar methods in the context of ‘Somaesthetics’ (Höök et al., 2015) (Lee et al., 2014) (Schiphorst, 2009). Somaesthetics is a phenomenological approach, defined as the ‘critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (Bukdahl, 2015).

The afternoon session provides space for discussion of participants experiences and of individual projects. Led by artist Dave Griffiths we will co-create a record of these discussions using his recent methods that take a diffractive approach to generating non-linear narratives about research sites. We will fuse participants ideas, texts, data, photos and drawings into a new conceptual body as a thinking-sensing instrument of possible use to our future research. This documentation will form a report for the NWCDP blog.