Workshop Offerings

Digital Creatures (60 min), best for 15-20 participants

Inspired by artists such as Nam June Paik and Tony Oursler, this workshop playfully challenges participants to perform, collaborate, and reimagine their devices as compositional tools while embracing the grotesque. Digital Creatures asks participants to use their bodies as elements to create a new "creature" — an amalgamation of everyone in the group. Participants are also asked to name the creature, define its mode of locomotion (it swims in the ocean, floats in the air, walks on all ten legs, etc.), and describe its personality or habits. This is a great icebreaker that gets everyone moving and working together, and leads to a lot of laughter and silliness. We normally vote for a favorite creature at the end.

This workshop promotes collaboration, quick thinking, physical engagement, problem-solving, thinking of screens as objects in space, and humor.

For longer workshops, I pair this with an introductory prompt in which I ask groups to create a composition with their devices featuring videos from their camera roll that remind them of home. The videos are often chosen around themes of nature, such as water. The presentations involve short stories about each clip and why it is meaningful to that person. This has been a particularly effective project with internationally diverse groups.

I contextualize both projects by showing clips from my own work — using body parts in performance to create new creatures, and using footage from my own life to generate imagery for my pieces.

NEEDS: Participants’ personal devices

The Second Body: Embodied Drawing Exercise (45 - 60 min), 20-25, or large group

In this workshop, I introduce Elvia Wilke’s idea of the “Second Body”, from Death by Landscape. The writing describes our first bodies as our skin-encapsulated body — but we also have a second body, one that reaches out on a macro scale beyond us to affect climate, environment, and other living things.

This workshop requires paper and pencil. After showing some images and video clips from my work, I ask the group to think about a moment in the last few years when they felt their life felt viscerally connected to an aspect of climate change or human impact on the Earth, at a large or small scale. I ask them to take a piece of paper and draw themselves in the center of the page, and create a surrealist image to express how they imagine their second body having an impact on a larger scale, as well as how climate change has an effect back to them. I ask participants or a few volunteers to share these images and describe what inspired them.

NEEDS: paper, pencils, erasers, pens, etc

Environmental Gestures (60 min), best for 15-24 participants

In this workshop, I give the prompt for participants to identify a moment of powerful emotion they had in relation to nature. (Joy, awe, reverence, fear, sadness, etc.) These will be turned into short narratives (about 1-2 minutes) to be told to everyone in a circle. The story must be illustrated by bodily gestures to make it an embodied experience, and all the participants in the circle must copy the gestures to follow along, making it their own embodied experience of the story. After the whole group has gone, the group tries to identify a gesture or a few words that we remember per person around the circle. I then lead the group in discussing whose stories had an impact on the participants. These embodied stories become part of all the participants, as if we got to live inside someone else’s memory, and can last a long time.

I also relate this exercise to my own work such as Infinitely Yours, where a gesture or imagining a body experiencing something can lead to creating a surreal image in performance.

Depending on the crowd, the prompt may be more skewed to positive experiences, or skew more towards our relationship to climate change, which may create more of an embrace of negative feelings, like sadness, yearning, fear, and hopelessness — I still believe that embracing these feelings of grief is an important thing to share and discuss, as grief is still a form of love and it must be channeled.

NEEDS: Participant’s bodies, studio with enough space to move

Live Camera and Performance (90-120 min, 15-18 participants)

In this workshop, I ask for a projector, a darkened studio space, and a projection surface to be provided (a white wall or a large screen that reaches the floor). If there is a document camera available, that is great; otherwise, I can set up a simple downshooter. Art supplies like paper, pens, scissors, and tape must be provided as well. The students are invited to use the art supplies to create images and assets that can be placed and manipulated under the camera to create an interaction with live performers. The workshop will start with a few experiments and exercises, then groups of 2-4 people will be challenged to make a short performance. In some past workshops, we did the final presentation as a kind of exquisite corpse to a piece of music.

NEEDS: Projector, document camera (or we can discuss webcam, or a phone with local WIFI…), art supplies, large white wall or large RP screen that reaches the floor

Experimentation with projection and body (120-180 min, 8-10 participants)

This is a longer-form workshop that is dependent on space, time availability, fore-planning, and resources (multiple classroom-style video projectors, RP screens, fabrics, C stands, objects, lights, webcams, etc.) as well as keenness from students. This workshop may be fairly free-form play with projections, including some initial orientation with the free software, Isadora.

NEEDS: Participants’ personal devices (smartphones, laptops), multiple projectors, various surfaces to project on, fabrics, cameras, green screen, art supplies…. To be discussed ahead of time.