The Refugee Tales walk is a political and aesthetic project inspired by the Canterbury Tales that calls for an end to indefinite immigration detention in the UK. The walk takes place regularly, including a 5-day hike every summer, and involves persons who have experienced detention, writers, activists, and supporters of the project. In this talk, I describe the experience of participating in this community of bodies in movement as a thoughtful calibration of distance—an allowance of time, space, and silence that enables a rethinking of tact as a political category. I sketch this practice by revisiting the work of Helmuth Plessner, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Edouard Glissant, and more recent figures like Anne Dufourmantelle and Pierre Zaoui. 

For the last twenty years Pedro Lasch has been staging experiments in everyday life with a set of mirror masks that are used in specific situations (Naturalizations series, 2002-present). At the core of this simultaneously intimate and massive process lies the question of the political and aesthetic potential of defacement: what is liberated in our individual and collective bodies when we detach from them that overpowering marker of emotion and identity. After reviewing a selective range of past contexts and their respective implications, Lasch concludes with observations, propositions, and questions that have emerged from this cumulative collective experience. 

Revolutionary movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s experimented with constructing political multiplicities and I want to focus on the strategic conditions necessary for those multiplicities to survive and be effective. One example I will explore is the set of student organizations that conducted strikes at universities in California and New York, calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front.  These Fronts included organizations of Black students, Chinese students, Mexican students, and others. My primary interest is how these groups strategically created the conditions necessary for racial multiplicities such that there was no priority or hierarchy among the different component groups. 

How does an interface distribute power? How does a social arrangement? How to imagine how to create both anew?

Sarah Rothberg presents artworks including NEW MEETINGS and THING.TUBE, which invite you to consider how the design of a communication technology shapes the way we connect. NEW MEETINGS is a real-time animated performance of avatars “meeting about whatever” broadcast from within a custom metaverse. THING.tube, a livestream network for artists made with the collective Is this THING On? (Christopher Clary, soft networks, and Molly Soda) is an experiment in software-development-as-performance.

In his talk Kent Bye reflects on the affordances of different mediums through the perspective of VR presence, and then looks at some of the immersive theatre and performance trends happening at the intersection of VR and immersive storytelling. Agency, embodiment, social dynamics, and emotional immersion are elemental ingredients that are combined in different ways to modulate the phenomenological qualities of immersive experiences, whether they are virtual or physical. Breaking down some of these live performances from the immersive storytelling and film festival circuit will help to elucidate some of the deeper trends happening with the future of AI and VR/AR (aka XR).

From the stage, to the living room, to outdoor screenings, to fantasy, to the privacy of one’s own bedroom, dance animates physical life—but with what? Over the years since the pandemic, dance artists have had to negotiate how their work meshes with digital social systems in order to create new channels for audience engagement.

How a white artist purposefully positioned himself as a beneficiary of murderous and exploitative policies, to later restitute the means of production to the very plantations that have funded European and American white cubes.