Fictional Reconfigurations (& Embodied Transformations) workshop series

Fictional Reconfigurations (& Embodied Transformations) is an online workshop series organised by Georgia Perkins and Amanda Rice featuring Nina Davies, Becky Lyon, and Jo Pester and their ideas on more-than-human intelligence, modes of communication, and agricultural practices. It explores the linguistic prefix ‘re-’ and its uses toward possible forms of resistance to today’s emergencies and calamities – geopolitical unrest, climate instability, and financial struggles – by posing practical alternatives to violent and inefficacious structures.

 

Jo Pester’s workshop (The Shape of Words/Worlds – Bodied Communication in Alien Landscapes) stems from her research into interspecies and more-than-human methods of communication, for instance, vibrations and disturbance patterns that convey auditory forms of cooperation and caution as well as human mis/translations through anthropomorphism in written text. Pester brings together myriad references, from extra-terrestrial languages in the film Arrival (2016), based on Ted Chiang’s book Story of Your Life (1998), to the Australian honeyeater birds forgetting their own song, to the super-rich funding interplanetary space travel at the expense of the survival of Earth. The group responds to prompts on the potentials and consequences of speculatively building one’s own communication tools in extra-terrestrial landscapes.

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FACILITATOR

Sirius Arts Centre

 

ORGANISERS

Georgia Perkins

Amanda Rice

 

ARTISTS

Nina Davies

Becky Lyon

Jo Pester

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