Iris Garrelfs will be hosting as Renee Carmichael and WhiteFeather Hunter share their Match-Making research: January 12th, 2022
For the ARE match-making collaboration, Renee Carmichael and WhiteFeather Hunter have explored the overlaps in their practices by bringing together DIY lab practices, video performance, movement improvisation and bioinformatics/data mining algorithms. Starting with the initial connection of using performance as resistance to the technological instrumentalization of bodies, the video performance was created over two Zoom sessions, recorded between Maui, United States and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then edited by each artist separately in an exquisite corpse exercise of translating messy embodied experiences into a final film.
The artists dialogue directly through the enacting of their creative processes, and the video performance embraces the glitches of living biological agents and algorithmic file errors, the adaption of experiments due to customs control and the ebbs and flows of pandemic life, the scale of the body as resistance and the possibilities for improvising when realizing protocols. The nourishing, intuitive and collaborative process shows how each artist thinks, while the overlapping of these differences is a form of resistance, one that opens up the complexity of technological and scientific processes to the incalculableness of bodies, glitches, movements and unexpected external agents.
Renee Carmichael is a researcher, writer and artist who dwells in the liminal and is inspired by mathematical thinking. She experiments with movement, body and code, exploring the calculated and the feeling through intimate performances, texts, podcasts, algorithms and online artworks. The formats of her artworks emerge from the contents themselves; each work is a process that experiments with the how and the why, often bringing together opposing ideas through soft and poetic equations of the everyday boundaries of bodies entangled with digital technologies. Movement for her is like thinking which is like coding which is like writing: they are all processes of understanding the complex world by being in it. She is founder of the project Flee Immediately!, co-founder of the podcast Liminal Bits, and a member of the telematic improvisation collective The Placeholder Group. She has a Master’s Degree in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths College in London and is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Art Theory at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
WhiteFeather Hunter is a multiple award-winning Canadian artist and scholar. She is currently a PhD candidate in Biological Arts at SymbioticA/ the University of Western Australia, supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Australian Government International RTP Scholarship and University of Western Australia Interational Postgraduate Scholarship. Before commencing her PhD, WhiteFeather was founding member and Principal Investigator of the Speculative Life BioLab at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University (Montreal) from 2016-2019.
WhiteFeather’s biotechnological art practice intersects technofeminism, witchcraft, micro- and cellular biology with performance, new media and craft. Recent presentations include at Ars Electronica, Art Laboratory Berlin, Academy of Applied Arts Vienna, Innovation Centre Iceland, and in numerous North American cities. WhiteFeather has conducted multiple collaborations with scientists, designers and artists: collaborative work with artist, Tagny Duff received an Honourable Mention and STARTS prize nomination at Ars Electronica 2019.
ART RESILIENCE ECONOMY RESEARCH 