Of Vessels, Conduits and Instruments: Reflections from the Bodies as Media Working Group

Resum

In the fall of 2016, a group of artists and educators met regularly over the course of three months to explore the many ways in which the human body mediates experience and knowledge. In their time working together, the Bodies as Media Working Group (BaM) explored the ways in which the (human) body comes to know, understand, and communicate ancestry, memory, ecology, emotionality, creativity, and even death. This working group was created as part of the School of Apocalypse (SoA), a NYC-based community of learning that examines connections between creative practice and survival.

 The BaM working group encapsulated its learning process by designing and producing a resource in the form of a deck of cards containing instructions and prompts meant to be activated as a ritual that aims to “turn on” people’s body awareness and to prepare their bodies to learn. In designing a pedagogical tool for the body, BaM aims to reconstitute the individual and social body contained most commonly in the classroom as open, trusting, and alert. The tool thereby redesigns the space within which learning takes place without making any physical alterations to it, but rather by reconfiguring the group’s relationship to it and within it.