Body, Memory, Migration, Telematics
Today I participated with a talk in the Journees Thematics, reflecting on the INTIMAL Project since its beginning to the creation of the INTIMAL App.
Many thanks to Peter Sinclair for the invitation, and to the community for the nourishing questions about different social and artistic aspects of the project.
Really happy to be part of an amazing Microresidency opportunity at SLOMOCO, from the Movement and Computing Conference. My understanding of abstract ideas into data and movement, and a critical reflexion on each “step”, offered me clarity to continue in developments, applications and questionings with the INTIMAL App. Thanks for the Cohort conversations, and the provocations. Really delighted with the process and the listening in this community. Slowing down. From SloMoCo:
“SloMoCo asks: how can we co-design and develop research and practice events that treat virtual and telematic engagement as a feature and not a bug? What does this third space look like? With its penchant for observing and prototyping embodied experience, technical know-how, know-what, know-when, we believe the MOCO community is uniquely situated to respond playfully to this speculative invitation. For the last seven years, MOCO has convened research-practitioners with diverse metier in dance, somatic practice, theory, education and learning science, HCI, engineering, design, and neuroscience to share insights, findings, and provocations at the intersection of movement and computing. The community seems to return to a generative tension and complexity between the moving body as experienced and as represented. With SloMoCo, we return once more with a difference to ask how these insights can inform the presentation and performance of our work in this experimental setting. How can this attention to representation and abstraction of movement play a role in telematic, collaborative, and relational artistic practice? How can attunement to embodiment and facility with real-time movement analysis generate new modes of engagement? Through a series of events, opportunities, and endpoints, this reformatted conference/series will provide season, solstice, celebration, and structure as we head forward in order to produce a collective sense of time and a collective sense of possibility.”
I presented at the NowNet Arts Conference, Transformation of Distance, which interrogated distance understood “as geographic distance and broader concepts such as physical, emotional, societal, environmental, and dimensional distance”. I presented the artistic process and the results of people experiencing the INTIMAL App in Bath, in the form of a paper called “Sonic Proximity: locating oneself and the others within “a migratory journey”. I also had the joy to improvise with NowNet Ensemble, and to improvise music telematically with the new Raspberry Pi Ensemble, together with Gloria Damijan and Jane Wang!
NowNet Arts proposes:
“What is distance? How is distance transformed in the field? How can the field address distance through diversity, equity, access, and inclusion? How can the geographic nature of network arts transform environmental relationships? Is there distance in loss on individual and collective scales that can be transformed? How can we develop artistic and technological components of these transformations in our field?”
Hoy tuve el placer de presentar brevemente el proyecto INTIMAL, y participar con 28 creadorxs y sentipensantes de todas las esquinas en Latinoamérica, en el primer taller NIME Latinoamérica, en el marco del 18th Brazilian Symposium of Computer Music. NIME significa New Interfaces for Musical Expression, y queremos entendernos desde el contexto Latinoamericano:
“La Red de Investigación NIME Latinoamérica tiene como objetivo proveer un espacio para compartir recursos, tutoriales y repositorios para miembros de la comunidad, así como para visibilizar su trabajo. También buscamos organizar encuentros y eventos que serán comunicados en esta página y mediante nuestras plataformas de comunicación (por favor, contactar a los administradores para acceder a estas plataformas).Con esta red pretendemos dar los primeros pasos hacia la creación de una comunidad NIME latinoamericana así como también consolidar el futuro de esta comunidad al interior y más allá de NIME, abriéndonos a otras comunidades de América Latina e inspirando cambios políticos para apoyar el desarrollo de nuestras comunidades locales.” Interesades en hacer parte de esta Red nos pueden contactar a lxs organizadorxs. Es una experiencia muy enriquecedora, única y necesaria para nuestros retos Glocales!
Tuve el placer y fortuna de ofrecer una charla sobre Performance Telemático Sonoro el pasado 21 de Octubre en el Bootcamp SINTESIS en Bogotá. Parte de IoT (Internet of Things o Internet de las Cosas), tuve la oportunidad de tener una conversación con preguntas muy interesantes que surgen de la interdisciplinariedad: Artistas, Diseñadorxs, Ingenierxs, Músicxs, interesades en procesos creativos con tecnología y sonido. Agradezco a Eduardo Montilla y lxs organizadores por esta interesante invitación! Nuevas redes re-pensándonos los procesos tecnológicos y aprendiendo interdisciplinariamente.
An article written by the INTIMAL collective, and titled “INTIMAL: Relational listening that unknowingly prepared us for the COVID-19 pandemic” has been published by the magazine Routed and iDiaspora, in an special issue, “Empowering global diasporas in the digital era”. It has been published in English, Spanish and French.
We are proud of sharing this issue with other 18 experiences using digital technologies in different ways to use digital media to connect, help, heal and stand for migrant’s needs and rights all over the world.
We are grateful the editors and the team that makes this possible!
I was invited on May 26th and June 2nd to The Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM) by the Research Group “SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media”, to share my research with the project INTIMAL, first stage, and to offer a Sentient workshop , involving Deep Listening®, Relational Listening, and experiencing the INTIMAL App© which is part of the second stage of the project. This time, the frame of the collective experience was proposed as “Dreaming while awake: for a network of presence“. Thanks to all the members of the group for engaging with the experience of listening, walking, and connecting to the place and to others, while experiencing different levels of presence. Thanks to Kate Donovan for the invitation!
INTIMAL App© is a mobile phone application developed by Ximena Alarcón that invites people to listen to their “migratory journeys”, by walking in their surroundings, to sense place and sense presence, alone and with others across distant locations.
The app senses users’ walking rhythms to be sonified and perceived as breathing. When used collectively, people can hear each others’ walking patterns as “breathing”, feeling embodied emotional telepresence. Within the journey the app reveals excerpts of stories of migration, that might trigger a response from the user, building the path with words and memories, as relations emerge and connect in an exercise of shared memories.
This current artistic and technical implementation was funded by The Studio Recovery Fund, awarded by The Studio, Bath Spa University’s Enterprise and Innovation Hub. This fund helped to ‘unlock’ the possibilities of the App by developing a service for the INTIMAL app and test its usability, within the context of the pandemic lockdown. The service aims to create local and distant connections by sensing rhythms, opening new paths and insights in people’s daily limited walks during and after the pandemic lockdown, and ‘unlock’ contemporary stories of local places, triggered by voices of Colombian migrant women from the INTIMAL Collective. This work was tested and implemented in collaboration with Service Designer Dr Liliana Rodríguez, and programmer Kieran Harte.
As a result of the UNLOCK project, awarded to Ximena Alarcón by The Studio Recovery Fund, and in collaboration with Liliana Rodríguez and Kieran Harte, we will showcase the results of testing and developing further the INTIMAL App©.
We will demonstrate how we have developed the INTIMAL App© to allow the user to connect with others through their walking and breathing patterns as they listen to stories collected from Colombian migrant women living in Europe. Other five projects funded by The Studio Recovery Fund, will be part of this showcase on 25th of May, 11am – 3pm.
Here you can read the program.
Here you can book your free ticket for the event.
The Studio, Bath Spa University’s Enterprise and Innovation Hub
All welcome!
Intimal App© is a mobile phone application developed by Ximena Alarcón that invites people to listen to their “migratory journeys”, by walking in their surroundings, to sense place and sense presence, alone and with others across distant locations.
The app senses users’ walking rhythms to be sonified and perceived as breathing. When used collectively, people can hear each others’ walking patterns as “breathing”, feeling embodied emotional telepresence. Within the journey the app reveals excerpts of stories of migration, that might trigger a response from the user, building the path with words and memories, as relations emerge and connect in an exercise of shared memories.
I am happy to announce that I have been awarded The Studio Recovery Fund , for the sub-project UNLOCK to develop a service for the INTIMAL App© (by Ximena Alarcón, 2021), and test its usability and unlock narrative options by women in Bath, within the context of the pandemic lockdown. The mobile app will take them on “migratory journeys”, helping them to explore a sense of place and a sense of presence, through their physical and emotional connections with local places, stimulating collective storytelling. The service explores alternatives to screen interfaces to feel embodied emotional telepresence. It aims to create local and distant connections by sensing rhythms, opening new paths and insights in people’s daily limited walks during and after the pandemic lockdown. I am very pleased to work on this project in collaboration with the Strategy and Service’s Designer Dr Liliana Rodríguez, and BSU’s Creative Computing programmer Kieran Harte, to test the app’s context, technological development and implementation, through a Co-design workshop with experts at The Studio, and with a User X workshop with nine women based in Bath.
The Studio Recovery Fund “aims to help freelancers, micro-businesses and third sector organisations in the BANES area”. Six projects were selected over 30 businesses applications for creative technology projects that aim to promote renewal and support the region’s post-pandemic recovery efforts. This is an exciting opportunity for me to test the concepts of the INTIMAL project and expand these in the local space, and across distance locations and proximities. I look forward to listen to the stories that the project helps to emerge.
As a resident at The Studio I have been exploring how to make accessible different aspects of the INTIMAL system, developed between 2017-2019. In 2020 I started as a Resident, and received support from Bath Spa University and the Graduate Internships program, to work in a prototype of the app with the support of the programmer Ricardo Graça. With The Studio Recovery Fund Award, the app goes further, exploring collaborations, and testing it with local users.
INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening 