This workshop is a place to collectively reflect on our experience with technology during the COVID19 quarantine as our community grapples with the challenges. If you are interested in creative interaction, please join us to take the limitation of these remote conditions for a spin. The sessions will act as a platform to connect, be creative, and feel more comfortable with online collaborative approaches and most of all work with what we have and the possibilities within ourselves. The workshop is not discipline-specific, the only requirement is your willingness to engage with creative methods. As a starter, I will introduce the technique my co-author and I used for a year and a half during our remote collaboration to produce our book that has recently been published. See more about the book here>>

Limitations and distance will be our inspiration. 

We are all perfecting the “embrace it and work with it” pedagogy collectively. For some of us this concept has been quite familiar. I personally grew up in Hungary, witnessing the last decade of the Cold War, a culture of limitations. It’s not by accident that I’m interested in concepts responding to the limitations of technology and that I find this time creatively stimulating.

This situation of working in distance is a great way to work around limitations. I certainly had fun in he past when in one way or another I was being apart from someone I was collaborating with. See some examples of this here: Budapest – Chicago >>   Somerville – Lesvos, Greece >>  An attempt to merge two studios afar>>   Collaboration with Hungarian poet while traveling through timezones>>  There are many distances we already navigate: timezone, geographical, and disciplinary distances. I would also like to mention related examples from art history: Stan VanDerBeek who predicts Photoshop and YouTube in 1969>> and the mesmerizing Nancy Holt in Boomerang by Richard Serra from 1974>>and more to come.

INT3RDISCIPLiNARY:
When working interdisciplinarily, I like addressing the importance of historic examples, such as the experimental education at Black Mountain College, institutionalizing Avant-Garde at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the disciplinary debates at The Macy Conference(s). The Macy Conference was a series of meetings held in New York during the 1940s-60s facilitating multidisciplinary exchanges concerning human-machine communication and their implications on various fields. The resulting conversations were vital but not entirely inclusive, so it was far from perfect. Nevertheless, I do like its principle concept that helps me with my own collaborations outside of visual art, and this concept is based on the notion that collaborations between disciplines start with the search for a common language. For this purpose, I included examples of my works and others’ that relate to the themes of this workshop: distance, limitations, instability, collective, detachment, disembodiment, delay, echo, feedback loop, screen, legibility, etc

Even though nothing will replace the dynamic work we were doing on campus until COVID-19, remote classes offer new ways of thinking and connecting. Let’s come together, no pressure, this is not about being productive, but rather about trying out something new. No preparation or prior experience is necessary.

I hope this workshop will offer a new platform for channeling our collective creativity and interdisciplinary thinking. 
Please email me if you have questions or if I missed anything. zs100@wellesley.edu

-Zsuzsanna