The Showroom
Event

DigitalDisco

Saturday 21 March 2015
2–5.30pm
Free, no booking required

01944

The DigitalDisco is a practical exploration of the body in a digital landscape organised by Goldsmiths MFA students. Through collaborative research, they are testing the boundaries of what it means to be human in a digital era.

Participating artists include: Sherko Abbas, Juheon Cho, Lydia Cohen, Saranjit Birdi, Janet Currier, Alison Ballance, Shelby Seu, Kyounghee Lee and Natasha Lubis.

This workshop will host a disco of colour and rhythmic digital beats. Liquid projections will provide a backdrop for bodily traces and forms. As an introduction, MFA students will outline the primary forms of engagement with the subject, be that music, performance, dance or academic research.

Using The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici as starting points, the student group have been looking at the concept of bodies in the digital age in relation to flow, immersion and absence. Florence Peake and Shama Khanna will join in the discussion, responding to these key texts and collected research through their respective practices.

Peake will lead a Skinner Releasing movement session using guided imagery and tactile hand studies for gentle releasing of tension to allow for maximum freedom of movement.

Khanna will present a screening programme entitled Transcending Flatness spanning over 50 years of digital artists' moving image practice including works by Stan VanderBeek, Tom Lock, Ben Russell and Elizabeth Vander Zaag. In considering the physical in a digital age, what if anything, is being compensated in the creation of avatar aesthetics? What happens to our bodies when we are in a state of digital immersion? Who, or what fills the space of absent bodies in digital production?

Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. Recent work has been concerned with the often hidden production processes of artworks, interacting with, reimagining and reframing the procedures, actions and gestures involved in both making a piece of work and packaging it (literally). Florence is an Artsadmin Associate artist 2012–15. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and performed at Hayward Gallery; National Portrait Gallery; BALTIC; David Roberts Art Foundation; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art Oxford; Toynbee Studios; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Exchange Gallery, Penzance. florencepeake.com

Shama Khanna is a curator and writer based in London. Her current focus concerns Flatness, an ongoing research project engaging with the screen-based image in relation to internet culture. Originating as the thematic program at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival 2013, Flatness currently operates across multiple platforms including flatness.eu. Khanna has presented screening and discussion events relating to Flatness at venues including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Western Front, Vancouver and Moderna Museet, Malmö. Previously, Khanna has worked with The Showroom, E:vent and LUX / ICA Biennial of Moving Images in London, amongst other collaborations. She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the University of the Arts, London and is a contributor to Art Review, Art Monthly and frieze magazines.
flatness.eu