Toward a New Bohemia
I am presenting work this week at a creative salon in Manhattan around the theme of a new bohemia looking at radical new intimacies in a post digital state.
For the last decade or so I have been working with a nomadic social practice that grew in response to it’s formation along side the emergence of the digital age. Moving around a lot, many of my meaningful relationships have been maintained online. In response to this I work with unmediated human interaction as my medium, placing the work in the space between people by building human relationships as sculptures, and approaching mindfulness as creative practice.
We have found ourselves in a situation where the necessities communication can now be taken care of digitally, which, to my mind, opens up the real-space encounter for redefinition. As it is when anything becomes obsolete, it becomes available to unprecedented experimentation, since it’s utility function taken care of.
This makes it a super exciting time for human to human encounters. What can we do with these bodies in space?
Now that information is best received in text, how can we allow the embodied, unspoken elements of exchange to come to come to the forefront of our awareness, everyday?
How can we come together in the increasing isolation of densely populated urban spaces?
How can we activate the things we think are important in our own lives when so many of our needs and options are prescribed to us?
How can we find harmony and individuality within the slip-stream of social movement?
I don’t have definitive answers, nor do I look for any, but these questions inform my performative research. I see performance art as an arena where we can experiment pre-figuratively with turning ideas into actions to enact possible futures.
