INTIMACY PROGRAMME:

FRIDAY 7 DECEMBER

10:00-17:00 [Home London]
One-to-One Performances – Programme TBC soon, check website for regular updates

10:00-14:00 [Graduate School Seminar Rooms]
SEMINAR: THE TIME IT TAKES TO TRUE
Leader: MINE KAYLAN, Goldsmiths/University of Sussex
The seminar will investigate a poetics of live interaction with particular attention to time as a significant vector in ‘meaningful’ exchange. Within the context of proximal and of telematic /virtual environments, how does the play of time work in what we might identify as poetic exchange, which we yearn for, recognize as precious, pay good money to experience? What is ‘intimacy’ within these terms? What can we learn from cinema makers about structures of time and visual rhythm in interactions through telemotion? These are some questions I am sucking on, still.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacytimetotrue.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

11:00-17:00 [Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus]
WORKSHOP: BODIES OF COLOUR
Leader: PROF. JOHANNES BIRRINGER, Brunel University of West London
For this workshop, Prof. Birringer suggests a reflection on the art of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (see show at Tate Modern, June-September 2007): “Oiticia moved from abstraction and 2D work to increasingly 3D works, sculptures, then boxes, installations, architectural models and social projects. His work of the 60s and 70s culminates in the Penetraveis and Perangolés series. In the late 70s, just prior to his premature death while in exile in New York, he created several installations called ‘Quasi-Cinema’ (audio visual installations for the audience-participants, based on his utopian and metaphysical principles of vivencia and the supra-sensorial). The Perangolés have always attracted my attention, as they are ‘wearables’ (inhabitable fabrics, colours-in-action). I see them as extraordinary forerunners of our contemporary experiments with wearables. For INTIMACY I will invite the participants to explore the contemporary (technologically augmented and supported) wearable sensorial interface for performance, by wearing special garments with sensors, and interacting in the tactile sensorial manner within the media environment (images, sounds, colours).”
Tickets: 11.5 GBP, concessions 7.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacybodies.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

10:00-18:00 [Laban Studio at Goldsmiths Campus]
WORKSHOP: INTIMATE DETAILS ONLY
Leader: KIRA O’REILLY

Dispersed, elaborated and localised intimacies cluster and move between the complex webs of you and I.
Drag lines and spindles of utterances.
Radical tangos.
Scalpels teasing tissue apart.

Peculiar occurrences of confidence and trust, wonderment and astonishment manifest, unannounced from our reassembling and disassembling of events that unfold, processes that cascade in our designed moments of actions, performances, makings and unmakings.

Sometimes it means that someone thinks I love them. Or that they have love me. It gets all mixed up.

Perhaps we can figure out how to occupy some of the pauses, lapses and moments within this conflicting and confusing concept of intimacy.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps we initiate wilful failures and radical dissociations.
Perhaps we will break our hearts in some disastrous dissasemblage.

Tickets: 11.5 GBP, concessions 7.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacydetails.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

14:00-18:00
SEMINAR: AT RISK [Goldsmiths: Graduate School Seminar Room]
Leader: TRACEY WARR
Body Art puts an other human body in your lap in live performance, photographic document or on screen image. It has often made hard looking for audiences. It asks what is it to be human and what is it to be humane. In this workshop we will examine our own responses, responsibilities and complicities in relation to a range of historical and contemporary artists’ work, including Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere. We will consider our responses in relation to differing modes of proximity – as viewers of live performances, photographic documents and on screen images.
We will examine a range of theoretical positions on the issues of empathy and responsibility. In the 1930s psychologist Paul Schilder argued for a shared ontology between bodies, claiming that ‘the laws of identification and of communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain everybody’s affair’. Does Rosalind Krauss’ contention of an aesthetics of narcissism which she applied to video in the 1970s apply to the digital now? Kathy O’Dell’s critical work explores the notion of a contract of complicity between artist and audience. For Nelly Richard the body is ‘the meeting place between the individual and the collective … the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourses’. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has demonstrated how the body has the status of being our most definite material reference point and is therefore used to give substance to ideologies or to take it away. The body has been the site of both ideological control and resistance.
Digital technologies have been a key influence in bringing the embodied consciousness and a metaphysics of the body back into focus. What qualities of human interaction are enabled or disabled by digital technologies? If our contemporary co-existence in both real and digital habitats is increasingly removing the distinction between real and fictional or simulated, fantasy and fact, how is that affecting our values? The computer or TV screen turns the live human into a digital object, an avatar. The digital tends to the specular, the solitary, the pornographic, the onanistic, the commodity. Can we play responsibly with each other in the digital domain?
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacyatrisk.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

18:30 – 23:00
LAUNCH OF INTIMACY – FREE, no booking required!

Come along for a very exciting evening of cutting-edge performances and a few glasses of wine, and SPREAD THE WORD.

An eclectic programme of live performances taking place at Goldsmiths Campus: Ben Pimlott Foyer & Seminar Rooms, George Wood Theatre and Studio 3.

With artists: SUKA OFF (Poland), Tale of Tales (Belgium), Avatar Body Collision (International) among many others.

Full Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.

SATURDAY 8 DECEMBER

10:00-14:00 [Goldsmiths: Graduate School Seminar Room]
SEMINAR: PERFORMANCE AND PORNOGRAPHY
Leader: DR. DOMINIC JOHNSON, Queen Mary University of London
This seminar will address representations of erotic and sexual intimacy in performance. Performance will be explored as a staging of forbidden or otherwise troubled intimacies, thinking through works that figure intimacy between queers, intimacy with animals, and intimacy with children. Works for discussion may include Ron Athey and Lee Adam’s
/Revisions of Excess/ event, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s /Porcile/ and /Salo/, Kira O’Reilly’s /Inthewrongplaceness/, Tennessee Williams’ /Suddenly, Last Summer/, and the photography of Slava Mogutin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Kern. In approaching these diverse performances of difficult intimacies, critical frameworks will be set up, deploying Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the infinite intimacy that is the epiphany of the
face-to-face encounter; William Haver’s imagining of “the pornographic life” lived within the proximate horror of intimate risk; and Georges Bataille’s writings on the threat of intimate interiors as a “scandalous eruption”. In exploring these varied cultural practitioners, odd contiguities, favourable mutations and unfamiliar critical intimacies
may hopefully arise.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacypornography.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

10:30-14:30
WORKSHOP: INTIMACY AND RECORDED PRESENCE [Goldsmiths: George Wood Theatre]
Leader: KELLI DIPPLE, Tate
This workshop will explore intimacy and presence within the context of the recorded image. Using as a basis for form, instruction based action and one to one performance. The camera is often the interface between performer, action and technology. It is a key element in the relationships between kinaesthetic forms and digital outputs. It is an important starting point and often under estimated. The relationship between performer and camera operator, whether working towards a pre-recorded or live output can be a creative and conversational partnership. With attention and development it can be a complex dialogue involving the intimate exchange of much knowledge. Participants will
explore the power of cinematography in the creation of intimacy and presence. Sound will also be discussed as an integral element.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacypresence.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

11:00-18:00 [Goldsmiths: Small Hall /Cinema] – FREE, no booking required!
A MARATHON of SHOW & TELL presentations and SCREENINGS with selected artists from around the world.
Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.

11:00-18:00 [The Albany: Community Rooms & Studio]
Performances with artists Sam Rose (UK), Mary Oliver (UK), Leena Kela (Finland), Rachelle Beaudoin (USA), Pierre Bongiovanni & Camille Renard (France) and Martina von Holn (UK), among others.
Programme TBC soon – check website for frequent updates.
Many of the performances are FREE to the public.

14:00-18:00
SEMINAR: (Dis)Embodiment
Leader: PROF. PAUL SERMON, University of Salford.
This seminar will identify and question the notions of embodiment and disembodiment in relation to the interacting performer in telematic and telepresent art installations.
At what point is performer embodying the virtual performer in front of them? And have they therefore become disembodied by doing so? A number of interactive telematic artworks will be looked at in detail during the seminar, establishing case-study examples to answer these questions. Stemming from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz seminal work Hole-in-Space to Paul Sermon’s telepresent experiments with Telematic Dreaming and to the current immerging creative/critical discourse in ‘Second Life’ that polarizes fundamental existential questions concerning identity, the self, the ego and the (dis)embodied avatar.
Tickets: 7.5 GBP, concessions 4.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacydisembodiment.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY

14:00-18:00
WORKSHOP: AVATAR PASTE AND CODE SOUP IN FIRST AND SECOND LIFE
Leaders: ASS. PROF. SANDY BALDWIN, West Virginia University & ALAN SONDHEIM
This workshop will take place in the virtual world Second Life, and will be conducted by Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin, with participation by other artists and performers in Second Life. Participants from the Intimacy conference will be supplied with location and others details within Second Life. The workshop emerges from Sondheim and Baldwin’s ongoing exploration of analog and digital bodies, using a range of technologies to remap the solid and obdurate real of bodies into the dispersions and virtualities of the digital, and then back again into real physical spaces. The “avatar paste” of the title means at least three things.
Firstly, the pasting of viewpoints together, the suturing of the subject into the avatar. Secondly, paste as glue, as half-liquid and half solid, as a materiality of renewable and infinite pliability. This is the chora of the avatar, the body matrix that is less a framework than a smearing of paste. And thirdly, paste as pasty and dis/comfortable substance, paste as slimy and dripping. While this abjection is already implicit in paste as glue, the pastiness of paste involves the projection and dreaming through of the avatar, the inhabitation of avatar bodies and the emptying of real bodies into the avatar.
“Avatar paste” comes out in avatar motions and behaviors. Firstly, these are formed by symbolic orders, presenting surfaces to read in terms of sexuality, power, emotion, and other projections. At the same time, the pasty avatar body tends towards collapse and abjection. Work on the avatar becomes a choreography of exposure and rupture, modeling and presenting inconceivable and untenable data, within which tensions and relationships are immediate and intimate. One might imagine, then, this inconceivable data as a form of organism itself: as part of a natural world or a world already given; out of this we might think through new ideas of landscape, wilderness, hard ecology, the earth itself.
The workshop will theorize and demonstrate these topics. The first part discusses theoretical frameworks. Alan Sondheim will introduce the topic of dismemberment and telepresence in terms of the presence or appearance of abjection in Second Life avatars. He will connect this to the epistemology of emptiness vis-a-vis sheave theory and Buddhist philosophy, and then to the problems of motion and behavior of avatars. Sandy Baldwin will discuss the topography of limits in Second Life, both body limits and spatial limits, an connect this to issues of the hunt and animal display.
He will also discuss the dynamics of performance and audience in Second Life. The second part of the workshop will show off Sondheim and Baldwin’s approach to re-mapping live bodies into Second Life performances, including: video and other
examples of motion capture and scanning; intermediate processing of files (e.g. editing .bvh data or working with Blender); and then the resulting works, including documents of Second Life performances and re-mappings back into “first life” spaces with dancers and other live performers. The final part of the workshop will include avatar performance by Sondheim, Baldwin, and other participants in Second Life.
FREE!
Book Now by emailing: drp01mc (at) gold.ac.uk
LIMITED CAPACITY

19:30 [LABAN Studio Theatre]
World Première: SUNA NO ONNA (Woman of the Dunes)
Dans Sans Joux has been commissioned to create a new movement-design performance for Intimacy. Suna no Onna, adapted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mysterious 1960s cult movie, is a dance installation that merges virtual and real images of a life of existential entrapment in an inhospitable habitat. The ominous sand dunes of Teshigahara’s desert are transformed into virtual realities that shape the unconscious ground where the Woman (Katsura Isobe) meets a scientist-foreigner who stumbles into her life to become a captive.
The work combines dance, interactive video and animation, fashion design, and electronic music created by an ensemble of artists from diverse creative backgrounds. The integration of the various elements of this performance follows an experimental fashion design concept for the development of sensorial and interfacial garments (built with intelligent materials) which respond to movement qualities, energies and emotional gesture.
Conceived and directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, the stage production features new fashion concepts by Danjoux and digital designs by a group of collaborating artists including Paul Verity Smith, Doros Polydorou, Maria Wiener, and Jonathan Hamilton. Original music is composed by Oded Ben-Tal, and the scenography is by Hsueh-Pei Wang. Lighting design by Miguel Alonso. Suna no Onna is performed by an international cast of three – Japanese dancer Katsura Isobe, British dancer Olu Taiwo, and Chinese dancer Helenna Ren.
Tickets: 12 GBP, concessions 8 GBP
Book Now at: https://www.purchase-tickets-online.co.uk/peo22430/default.asp
LIMITED CAPACITY

SUNDAY 9 DECEMBER

INTIMACY SYMPOSIUM

9:30-10:00
REGISTRATION & COFFEE

10:00-10:30

INTRODUCTION: RACHEL ZERIHAN & MARIA X

10:30-11:15
KEY SPEAKER: PROF. AMELIA JONES

11:15-13:15
Erotics of (Dis)Embodiment
Panel & Seminar Feedback
Speakers: Prof. Professor Paul Sermon, Dr Dominic Johnson, Ang Bartram, Kelli Dipple, Prof. Thecla Schiphorst
Chair: Prof. Janis Jefferies

13:15-14:15
Lunch Break – Cooking event with Hiwa K. (Iraq/Germany) and live performance with Adam Overton (USA)

14:15-16:00

AT RISK
Panel & Seminar Feedback
Speakers: Tracey Warr, Mine Kaylan, Kira O’Reilly, Dr Simon Jones, Jess Dobkin

Chair: Prof. Adrian Heathfield

16:00-16:30

Coffee Break

16:30-18:00
INTIMACY Open Discussion
Chair: Prof. Johannes Birringer

18:00-19:00
Live Performance with Anesthesia Associates (NZ)
Tickets: 14.5 GBP, concessions 9.5 GBP
Book Now at: http://intimacysymposium.eventbrite.com/
LIMITED CAPACITY