아트로포스 _ 재앙의 위상학

Atropos: A Topology of Disaster

개요 _ A One-Day Event of Speculative Fiction, Collaborative Storytelling and Aesthetico-Ethical Creation


2013.8.10

OISE – University of Toronto

curated by
Department of Biological Flow

Atropos: one of the three Greek goddesses of fate and destiny, the eldest of the sisters, the one known as both inflexible and inevitable. It was Atropos who determined the end of life for each mortal by cutting their thread with a pair of shears. Mortality: one is alive and spinning a fibre at one moment, only to receive an untimely severance the next.

But this is not to gender the forthcoming disaster. Rather, we are interested in exploring the potential of the cut itself: its tempo, decisiveness, beauty and trauma — in short, its gesture. We approach disaster as a woven and folded tapestry of relations rather than as an accumulation of solitary threads, complicating the idea of a single fateful cut in the process. We suggest that while some cuts are more surgical and others more ragged, affirmative potentials may be found within each context.

Finally, we understand that the disaster is not some unknown future to come. It is already here — not forthcoming, but instead coming forth: the spectre of Atropos writ large over planetary destiny as an increasingly forceful precondition of the everyday. Collective imagination as gravitational force.

How does the artist or thinker respond as the blades slowly close?




A Tentative Chor(a)eo/graphy

1. Introducing oneself (from 2D to 3D).
2. Opening comments.
3. Left-eye/right-eye.
4. Blind reading.
5. Structures and flows.
6. Two storytimes.
7. Confessionals.
8. Two storytellings.
LUNCH.
9. Opening discussion.
10. Blind reading.
11. Structures and flows (affinity variation).
12. Toward technics of trauma.
13. Movement machines (with M. Alaoui).
14. Conclusion.

RETREAT TO PUB.

번역

정서연

원문출처

http://www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net/curated-events/atropos-a-topology-of-disaster/

TIMESPACE 815

TIMESPACE 815
research-creation residency

2014.1.17 - 19 & 3.14 - 16

former Northern Telecom manufacturing plant (Kingston, Ontario)

TIMESPACE 815 was a short residency undertaken by the Department of Biological Flow at a 450,000 sq.ft manufacturing plant in Kingston, ON, which had been more or less abandoned for 25 years. The residency took place over two weekends, the first in mid-January and the second two months later in mid-March.

For the two of us in this otherwise empty space, the scale was staggeringly enormous and the archaeology fascinating, if not deeply inhuman. Space here was visceral, dizzying and vertiginous in its industrial magnitude this first weekend, not to mention intensified by the brief 48-hour window.

And yet one of the interesting facets about this space was that all of the clocks in the building — the former Northern Telecom cable manufacturing centre — had stopped at 8:15 some time post-abandonment. This gave an uncanny sense of timelessness to our initial experience, which would then animate the second weekend of the residency.

As part of this second weekend we invited an involution of the famous Christian Marclay artwork “The Clock”. Participants were asked to submit one-minute video sketches in any subject or style, and with minimal editing, but which at some point showed a clock set to 8:15. This video project was incorporated into the new work that would emerge on our second visit.

One of the sensemaking strategies that organically emerged during the first weekend was a sort of cartography in the narrative form of a videogame. TIMESPACE 815 became the name of this videogame, and the second weekend formed a return to “play” the final four levels as research-creation practice.

The manufacturing plant is slated to be demolished in April 2014 to make way for a new housing subdivision. Along with it with go all material installations produced while in gamespace.

번역

정서연

원문출처

http://www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net/curated-events/timespace-815/

더 볼 거리
http://www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net/815-marclay-involution/

Channel Surf

Channel SurfA Paddling Caravan of Research-Creation along the Rideau Canal

Open Call for Participation // June 2015


curated by Department of Biological Flow

Do you remember analog television? Sure you do, even if it was so last century. Funny colour schemes, rabbit ears, wood panelling. And sometimes, if you turned the dial just so when changing channels, you could for a brief moment be between two signals and catch each of their fuzzy images simultaneously during the threshold of passage.

Now switch channels to the canal, an even earlier technology and yet one which still endures. Whither betweenness given such a channelled conduit? It is with this question in mind that the Department of Biological Flow would like to extend a call for participation in a durational event of emergent research-creation titled Channel Surf. Here, too, we propose a primarily analog gesture of imagination, with artists, thinkers, movers, activists and healers forming a travelling caravan of paddlers canoeing and camping up the Rideau Canal from Kingston to Ottawa over a 12-day period.

Along the way we will explore two different geospatial contexts for thinking about art, philosophy, movement and pedagogy: first, an aquatic topology whose boundedness moves fluidly between the relatively organic lakes and watersheds of the Rideau waterway, and the rationalized lock systems that connect their differential elevations en route; and second, a littoral threshold that serves as a transition between the boundaries of water and land lining our passage along the way—not to mention the historic villages which dot the trajectory of this canal or channel. Tempo figures heavily in the former instance while a certain intermedial diagramming will inform the latter, each woven back and forth throughout our journey.

Participants are invited to engage this event in one of three ways: 1) Liquids: as part of the core group of paddlers and campers who will begin the journey in Kingston and complete the entire passage along the Rideau Canal to Ottawa, offering a certain continuity to the event; 2) Catalysts: as one of those who cannot take part for the entire trip, but would like the opportunity to join and/or depart the caravan mid-stream, creating a necessary recharge of energies along the way; 3) Effervescents: as someone who would like to join the travelling group for a communal evening event on land—as, for example, with an interested local artist who lives along the historic route or some curious boater pitching camp at the same time. Thus, we shall have an ever-changing dynamic of relations and potentials over the lifecycle of the event.


번역

정서연

원문출처
http://www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net/curated-events/channel-surf/
http://www.projectanywhere.net/department-of-biological-flow-channel-surf/