80% seminar, Lina Persson
Transtopian Worldbuilding - Sensorimotor attunement, niche-making and refusals
october 21:st, 10:00-17:00
seminar structure and shedule:
During this seminar I will share my animation and world-building practice through the lenses of 1: sensorimotor processing, 2: niche making and 3: shutdowns and refusals. The seminar takes place in my home-studio. The journey to and the location of the seminar is meant to hint at how niche construction through sensorimotor process works in my practice. The ultimatum from my 50% seminar presents as example of somatic refusal. Work by Nedine Kachornamsong and Debora Elgeholm is shared, as examples of collective niche making. Vegan soup and fika is served.
This seminar is composed to be able to unfold in plural ways, meeting a variety of affordances and needs. It explores mediated formats for presentation and participation. It also explores flexibility for participating bodies. For example there are different options for rest and withdrawal in the form of secluded, silent zones, throughout the seminar. For those not attending physically, the seminars content can be accessed through this page. This option can also be utilized by those who need careful preparation. The seminar takes place an hour from stockholm central, with commuter train and bus (with option to join seminar coordinator from SKH for joint travel). For those who participate from other locations there will be a hybridity of options to take part in what happend on site as well as to respond and give feedback on this material.
For the seminar I ask you to bring an object that you feel attracted to for some reason. Something you like to look at, touch, smell. Something you often find in your pocket.
10.29-11.34
Commuter train towards Nynäshamn from T-centralen depart 10:29.
But the seminar begins already in your mouth when you brush your teeth before you leave home. Explore the surface of your teeth guided by this score. Listen or read in your bathroom:
The seminar continues in your fingers when you walk to your train stop. Explore surfaces with your fingers guided by this score. Listen or read, walking from home:
It moves on with the train, as you synch the passing landscape with the movements of your toes, guided by this score. Listen or read on the train:
When it clashes with existing worlds on a bus, gather seeds to alternative worlds. Listen or read on the bus:
11.34-12.00
Bus arrive at stop "Yxlö." 11.34.
Bus stop welcome and introduction.
30 min. joint walk through forest and a bit of uneven terrain.
12.00-12.15
Getting situated at home-studio, sharing food and the exhibited works of Debora Elgeholm & Nedine Kachornamsong.
12.15-13.15
Making ourselves comfortable.
Presentation of practice through the lens of 1: sensorimotor processing and 2: niche making and 3: shutdowns and refusals.
13.15-14.00
Stretch and yawn break & experiencing the space in choosen format.
14.00-15.00
Respons from opponent followed by discussion with Lina
(audio recording will be shared with remote participants retroactively).
15.00-15.15
Questions from the participants
(audio recording will be shared with remote participants retroactively).
15.15-16.00
Returning walk to the bus stop 16.09
Back at Stockholm central 17.**
Materials for opponent and participants:
In this paragraph, the focus of this seminar is summarized. On the right side, along this paragraph you find links and texts that first develop the concepts, and then exemplify the different parts of this reasoning with experiences from practice. Navigate this space and move as far, in this directions as you need or find interesting. Alternative reading: If the theoretical reasoning in this paragraph feels inaccessible, you can instead start over on the right hand, in a bottom-up approach, with the different examples from practice.
Summary:
During this project, I have been looking at my practice as a way of knowing, examining how I learn and come to know through what I do. At this point, I understand this knowing as relying on three fundamental mechanisms: sensorimotor processing, niche construction, and somatic refusal.
I have come to recognize that animation practice emerges from a kind of sensorimotor tuning that keeps me in touch with my environments. It helps me adapt my environments to my needs, but it also helps me to sense and regulate my own impact on them. This meeting halfway resonates with the concept of niche construction, a term from biology that describes how species evolve in entanglement with their environments. At the beginning of the project, I tried to frame my world-building as a transmedia practice, but I felt strong inner resistance to those forms. When I finally let go of that, I could understand it instead as a more existential and general approach to life in niche-making.
Over the course of the project, I have also recognized how these relational practices are undermined in many ways. Mechanisms in society suppress both tuning abilities and niche-making. For example, our social environments are often designed to be unresponsive, unable to tune. New Public Management within the university offers a clear example.
Alongside these practices of the sensroimotor and niche-making, I have regularly turned to acts that may seem very different from these attuning approaches: rigid reactions that stem from a sense of bodily refusal, expressed as ultimatums, cancellations, or withdrawals. I struggled for a long time to accept and understand this side of my practice. But eventually, I came to read it as a necessary response in situations where sensorimotor tuning and niche-making are undermined or suppressed. A withdrawal or refusal can interrupt a dysfunctional tuning relation. It creates a void by cutting ties with what was dominating the situation, and from this void, it becomes possible for something unforeseen to take place.
This new way of understanding my practice as a way of knowing has been deeply shaped by conversations within the neurodivergent and environmental community. Without being able to share the vague and often incomprehensible experiences of this project in that context, I would not have arrived at these deeper understandings. In the text Animation, Environmentalism and Neurodivergence I seek to portray this understanding in a wish to bring these communities closer together.
disclaimer: All texts are in the making, sometimes written in affect, and I still struggle with how to position myself and balancing the personal and the private and integrity of those I stand in dialogue with.
Thanks & acknowledgements (incomplete!without ordering!)
Tack till min Siv & Tom för svåra frågor, kärlek och för leken som ger mening.
Tack till min familj, som tålmodigt lyssnat när försöker förklara och förstå vad det är jag gör. tack till mina föräldrar som lät mig leka och springa fritt, följa även spår de inte kunde se.
Thank you Neding Kachornamsong for companionship.
Thank You Debora Elgeholm.
Thank you, Sher Doruff, Erin Manning, Lars Kristensen, Åsa Elzen for valuable supervising.
Thank you to the anarchiving online reading group.
Thank you to PhD fellows. list
Thank you to PhD fellow Josephine Rydberg for continuous and deepening exchange throughout these years.
Thank you to PhD fellow Ellen Nyman for ways to approach unknown unknowns.
Thank you to PhD fellow Mia Engberg
Thank you, Maria Hedman & Tinna Jone for patience and support.
Thank you, Cilla Roos för frön, plantor och öppet lyssnande.
Thank you to opponents Michael Baers and Karin Hansson
Thank you, Ek Val Solros
Thank you, Sonja Hedstrand, Sarah Guarino, Joanna Lombard, Amelie Björk for community.
Thank you, Idiomdrottning
Thank you, Mari lagerquist and Bibliotheket.
Thank you, Trinidad carillo
Thank you, Jenny Sunesson
Thank you, Josette Bushell-Mingo
Thank you, Robin Bukhamseen & Al Jenan
Thank you, all the students, that I have had the privilege to supervise or be respondent, opponent, examinator for.
Thank you, Orla Mc Hardy
Thank you Omi-Peah Ryding
Thank you Lokesha Haber for stitches and flute notes.
Thank you Anna Björklund for life cycle assessments, calculations, conversation and friendship. Thank you, Karin Lagercrantz, for life cycle analysis of my practice.
Thank you Anthony Mauricia, for game play and resonance.
Thank you, Lena Kempe, for your companionship in the development of Elsa.film.
Thank you Stella d'Ailly and Mossutställningar.
Thank you, Martin Hultman, for sharing your perspectives on experiments I have wanted to carry out.
Thank you, Karin Kebbe, Ingrid Sillen and the sauna community at tantobastun.
Thank you Per Hasselberg.
Thank you, students and teachers, at Skövde game writing for many explorations and experimentations of developing sensorial world-building workshops.
Thank you Prerna Bishnoi and Eco Fiction Writing Lab for play-testing and role-playing and contributing to developing of speculative hypothesis and climate imaginaries.
Thank you, Danial Pargman, and Sustainable Futures Lab at KTH for welcoming me and guiding me in finding collaborators in transdisciplinary future research. Presenting my projects to them has always opened up new ways and approaches.
Thank you, curator Waheeda Baloch, Bushra Hussain and the Karachi biennale team. Thank you, Wajdan Khan Khattak, Tofiq Pasha Mooraj and the Karachi marigold festival. Thank you Muhammad Hassan Kashigar and Fazal Ellahi Khan and students and teachers in SABS University, Jamshoro. Adeena Sabir
Thank you, Diego Galafassi and all participants at Climate story lab .
Thank you, Carmen Blanco Valer. Tom Goldtooth. Erena Rangimarie Rere Omaki Rhöse, Pia Björstrand, Swedish Earth Lawyers, Stefan Mikaelsson, Sara Ajnnak, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, End Ecocide Sweden, Färnebo Folkhögskola, Latinamerikagrupperna, Center for Earth Jurisprudence, Indigenous Environmental Network.
Thanks to artistic researchers who shared their experiences of practice in ways I could recognize and build on: Erik Sandelin, Malin Arnell, Kajsa Dahlberg, Lisa Nyberg, Cecilia Grönberg, Magnhild Øen Nordahl
Thank you, Clara Törnwall, Lina Liman, Pia Eriksson, Toni Borneo who in manifold ways described the disorienting way of growing up as unknowingly neurodivergent woman in neuropathic society. These descriptions helped make the conclusions of this research fall into their place.
Thank you, indigenous researchers and practitioners that patiently share and include into sensible ways of relating, limbic noodle, Carmen Blanco Valer, Åsa Simma Simma, Tom Goldtooth.
Thank you colleagues at the film and media department for rich conversations, Ylva Gustavsson, Brett Ascarelli, Anders Bohman, Carolina Jinde, Manuel Cubas, Marius Dybwad,
Thank you everyone in SKH’s research environment that informed my mediated practice with more consideration of the body; Becky Hilton, Dalija Acin Thelander, Chrysa Parkinson, Frank Bock, Martin Sonderkamp, Zoë Poluch, Jennifer Lacey, Cecilia Roos, Eleanor Bauer, Gwen Rakatovao, John-Paul Zaccarini.
Thank you, Aymara Von Borries, for summoning community across SKH, for dance-drawing with me and passing on healing with your hands of the hands of the hands...
Thank you to the self-organising student group “sharing practices” for co-creation and valuable feedback.
Thank you, researchers on somatic practices that share methods for going beyond how our senses have been regulated by the sociality we grew up in. Thank You Ann Juren for sharing Feldenkrais method and Skinner Releasing Technique, thank you Hanna Pajala-Assefa, & Pauliina Laukkanen at Theatre Academy Uniarts Helsinki for the workshop in TRE (Trauma and Tension Releasing Exercises) that helped me access more of my sensory intelligence. Thank you, Pavle Heidler, for introducing me to the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and for the workshop in Body-Mind Centering. Thank you, Yasmin Lambat, for techniques on pandiculation. Thank you, Kelly Mahler, for techniques on interoception. Thank you, Pat Ogden for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Methods. Thank you, Marge Blanc for the research on gestalt language processing.
Thank you researchers that has nuanced the image of neurodiversity with inside perspectives and experiences Adam Wolfond, Erin Manning, Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, Anna Nygren, Elisabet Hjort, Ingela Visuri, Ferdinand Deligny, .
Thanks to artists whose wo
Begin walking along the street • Look at your nails • Let them extend beyond you • As you walk, tap them softly on a passing surface • Tap to listen • Straighten your fingers, look at your palm • Use the inner upper joints to tap the next surface • Notice how the sound moves closer to the bone • While walking, let surfaces invite your tapping • Signal to mailbox, streetlights, fence, walls • Accept the replies they offer • Continue until you arrive at the station • When you return in the evening: Walk without touching anything, replaying the taps in memory.
Notice the train’s vibration, the screeching hum, the flicker of the view, all animating the inner. Test its rhythm with your toe. Unravel a thread of attention, let it fall on the passing ground. The spool spins within you, laying its line along the rails. The earth glides by like fabric beneath a sewing machine’s foot. Your toe, a needle, catches the running thread and begins to stitch — through the floor, into the soil, up again with every beat. Up and down, train and ground are sewn together with all you see, think, feel. Commuting, each journey adds a seam, the fabric thickening, a curve defining. Sometimes it wavers, yet over time, patterns form, even from the drifts. The yellow station house, the bay with rounded cliffs, the new-built district, each holds its layers from previous passings. Moods and thoughts return, pressing into the present, leaving their trace, on the embroidering of another layer.
And you have stepped into yet another world. Whose niche is this? Whose needs are met here? What feels comfortable here? What in you becomes uncomfortable here? Notice any impulse to adjust something, to fit better. Instead: pause. Feel it. Look around for something, that can support this part of you, in staying as it is. Trace the surfaces that touch your body. Push your feet against the floor. Lean, resist, stretch against the seat. Yawn widely. Sigh deeply. Press your forehead against the cool window to lower the intensity. Save these gestures, use them as seeds for an inner world. Repeat, next time the world shifts again.
1.Start at the right outer molar. Drive the tongue over the terrain. 2. around to the left molar. Swing around the cone. Return inner lapse. Repeat. 3. Notice bumps, grit, rough, fuzzy that slow. 4. Search for smooth. Glossy speed. Slippery curves. avoid: erosion. 5. Let electric toothbrush turn into a vehicle. Lap the track: outside – inside – around. 6. Pause to check the road with the tongue. Compare the shiny rush. 7. Continue racing until the track is a glide. 8 End when the teeth feel like a polished circuit.
Inner refusals and shutdowns functions as intuitive emergency break that interrupts sensorimotor niche creation (animated worldbuilding) when it has become destructive. This text exemplify with my refusal of Co2 and the refusal of my final seminar through the ultimatum I uttered at my 50% seminar.
Animation, Environmentalism and Neurodivergence, in this text I seek to bring these communities together.
Lina will present various fragments that sketch the contours, but not the entirety, of a three-dimensional figure of thought. This presentation will be improvised and informed by the attentions in the room, therefore I don’t know yet exactly what that will be.
If you prefer to get a prepared coherent linear account, a prerecorded presentation is available to listen to HERE:
Lina will carry out a monotropic dishwashing while participants are welcome to rest, socialize, eat, explore the site, or engage with the seminar’s materials. If you have any questions during this time Nedine Kachornnamsong have the answers.
WITHDRAWAL TO SILENT ZONE
If you need to withdraw from the seminar at any point, you are most welcome, at any time, to grab a blanket and go to one of the secluded, silent zones. You can either rest or keep following the seminar from this page, for examle listen to the audiotrack with my reflections on withdrawal and refusals among the materials further down on this page. If you need some tools to remove stress or regulate your body you can use one of these web resources:
Pandiculation; tap into the natural stretch and yawn response to bring you back in tune.
Orienting; A guide to orient and move by noticing the environment.
Breath; slow down breath with this 5 minute guide.
Overwhealm; a guide to cope with intense reactions of the body.
Walking meditation; If your body needs to move, activate your senses by this environment in this guided walking meditation.
TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises); activate the tremor of the mammal nervous systems ability to let go of stored stress and trauma.
Another intense refusal was the sudden resistance to printing the book for my storyworld. This refusal led to the understanding of the inner world as sensory and cognitive form. For this recent event I recorded my reflections around it. To work through this confusion I was in dialogue with many peopple; Carolina Jinde resonated with these thoughts in a soundwork and Clara Törnvall responded with an exhibition text.
The scores I shared above in the schedule, that aim to explore the travel to this seminar, are examples of how I engage with my everyday life movements sensorimotorly. Here are a few more expanding examples:
I will share three levels of niche-making in this seminar.
1. My working environment Stockholm Uniarts (SKH) is a shared social environment with a extensive bureocratic framework that I have related to first as teacher and then as researcher. I this text I describe some processes. of niche relating with SKH.
4. My inner world is another level of niche-making that has always worked as counter-environments or paralells to shared social realities for me. In these studies I have tried to concretizise this inner mental form to understand it better, one attempt is documented here: New Reactive Earth. The niche-making of my inner world and my working environment are deeply intertwined, a relationship I focused on during my 30% seminar.
3. My home-studio is yet another level of nich-making. It has not been part of my phd project but at this stage the project doesnt make sense without adressing it. It has emerged as an important collaborator and “cognitive niche” in my research. To better be able to think, express and talk about my research I decided to host my 80% seminar here. This niche also emerges from the periodic refusal of the university as working environment.
These texts about "inbetweening animation" and "straight-ahead-animation" gives an example of sensorimotor channeling within the animation practice:
The art project Marigold Resonance is an example of how sensorimotor processing, niche-making and refusals work together in driving an open-ended artistic process.
An alternative direction of approaching this research (wip):
As an alternative way of sharing this research I plan to make it accessible through the same bottom-up approach that has led to its conclusions. By bottom-up, i mean from the examples of practice you find moving towards the left from this paragraph (there are many more, but have tried to keep it limited for now). But it also emerges from other seemingly unrelated intrests.
The conclusions in this research have been reached by following deep interests in a wide variety of phenomena. In this section, I share a selection of these interests. This way of researching stems from a monotropic and hyperconnected approach to attaining knowledge, where a deep dive into one topic gradually reveals its connections to other areas of interest, and where a new, larger picture can gradually emerge.
With this I want to emphazise that sometimes pursuing many, seemingly separate topics might be nessecary to reach knowledge and meaning.
This "too wide scope", this "doing too many things at the same time", this "taking on a new thing without finishing the first" can be a way of interweaving by keeping simultaneous, as a way of revealing thier connections. Its an aesthetics and a storytelling of joint efficiency.
This is a work in progress. This screenshot hints at the unfinished variety of these focuses, some unfinished texts are included as well.
voicerecording:
I am so happy to be in this space. I have been working with Mari Lagerquist since art school, exploring how to construct space and place as a foundation for collaboration: first through the mobile gallery for site-specific interventions: The MobileBox. Later with the publishing collective A Shoal of Mackerel; and then with the art subscription project BILAGA.
Since moving away from Gothenburg, I’ve missed doing things together. And for a long time I’ve wanted to show something in Mari’s Bibliothek at Konstepidemin.
The problem was that I no longer seemed to be making work that could actually be shown in such a way. I used to love creating printed matter and books, but I hadn’t done so in years. But then I began working on New Reactive Earth—a book about my inner fictional world, which has always been a kind of motor for me. For a long time I struggled to grasp this world, to articulate it, to give it form in order to understand it. By using the format of the transmedia storyworld bible this abstract inner universe gradualy became concrete. I illustrated, categorized, wrote, proofread, and designed the book. I got help with graphic design and with climate-impact calculations. And after months of researching paper life cycles, the book was finally ready to print. I told Mari: now we could have a book launch in her Bibliothek!
I ordered a proof copy and enjoyed flipping through it. Yet something felt wrong. Not in the book itself—nothing about it was obviously wrong—but inside me. A stubborn refusal, a formless inner no. I tried to explain this hesitation to the printer and designer, but I couldn’t. At best, I had a vague sense it might be about the climate impact, though we had already chosen the most sustainable option available. And the paper had been ordered and couldn’t be returned. I felt strange and inadequate for wanting to stop without a clear reason. Guilt grew heavier over the unused paper. I went to the printer myself and hauled the entire pallet home. And then came another layer of regret: the lost chance to take part in Maris programming at the Bibliothek’s.
Cancelling the book was a far greater effort than creating it. It left me with guilt, shame, and frustration. It felt like a purely negative act—an erasure that rubbed off on me. I wondered: what was the point if I didn’t make my work visible, accessible in any way?
The paper from the cancelled print has now sat in my studio for a year and a half. I’ve started using the stack as a seat, with a cushion on top. But over this time, slowly, I began to understand why I couldn’t go through with the printing. The reasons emerged little by little, like layers gravitating toward the void left behind by the cancellation.
In knowledge theory one often uses the metaphor of what we know as visible ground beneath our feet, a solid island in a sea of unknown. We can explore the edges, expand our understanding. We can stand on the border and reach into that unknown with a stick. Feeling its invisible shapes with this “sensing-stick”, recognizing them into visibility, expanding our island. But too often, something in this process feels misaligned—as if we are hitting too forcefully, shaping the unknown more than listening to it.
Over the last year, I realized that the book I had been about to make was such a insensitive hitting. It would have swept across, smashing into pieces what was still forming. This space reserved for the not-yet-known was about to be occupied by something already preconceived—a duplication of what was already given. If the book had been printed, it would have filled that space.
I had used the transmedia bible format to structure my inner world and make it sharable. But the bible-formats original function is to be a manual. A go-to source when creating films or games based on a specific storyworld, ensuring coherence to a franchise. Its categories mirror existing structures. Over the past year, while reflecting with the blank papers, I came to understand that my inner world was my “sensing stick”—it was how I felt and processed possible new worlds into being. It needed to remain soft and flexible, so that it didn’t obstruct what it touched. It had to be responisve enough to stay in dialogue with the world, shifting and changing with every situation.
If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. By shaping my “sensing stick” as a manual, I had made it hard, loud, and insensitive—forcing whatever it met into its own form rather than allowing it to become-with what it encountered. Locking it in that stiff format would have killed it. Thanks to keeping the pages blank, and staying with the unfinished internal form, I could instead stay in more open dialogue. Reflecting together with this space, with Mari, Ek, Clara, more suitable forms continue to emerge.
If I had printed the book, all these unknowns would have remained hidden. The space had to be kept empty for them to appear.
Simone Weil wrote: Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. I think the same is true of the unknown: it needs emptiness to arrive, and in arriving, it also creates the void it needs… by taking the form of refusal, maybe.
Others may not always see this. They may insist, and interpret refusal as childish, irrational or pathological. So I have to keep reminding myself: the artistic freedom to refuse without knowing why is just as important as the freedom to create without knowing why. Maybe even more important.
To discover what we need but do not yet have words or concepts for, there must be some vacant space: a void, a blank page, a quiet moment, a withdrawn pause. For me, the library has always been such a space. I go there less to find a specific book than to catch my breath, to retreat from the noisy of school corridors and cities. Libraries hold space for small voices, for things not yet fully formed, for the fragile and unheard. They are places for careful probing.
I’m grateful my body insisted on that refusal—so that I could arrive at this way of collaborating with the Bibliothek. Not by filling it with another thing, but by celebrating it as place, void, space for what has yet to take shape.
@font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073697537 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-font-kerning:1.0pt; mso-ligatures:standardcontextual; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}p {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0cm; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}