80% seminar

Sensorimotor attunement, niche-making and refusals  

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 journey to and the location of the seminar is meant to unfold how niche construction through sensorimotor process works in my practice. The ultimatum presents as somatic refusal. Also presenting work by Nedine Kachornamsong and Debora Elgeholm, as example of  practices that I feel deeply connected with through collective niche making.

This seminar is composed to be able to unfold in different ways, meeting a variety of affordances and needs. For those who can not attend physically, its content can be accessed through this page. This option can also be utilized by those who need careful preparation. For those who join in person there are different options for rest and withdrawal in the form of secluded, silent zones, troughout the seminar. The seminar takes place in my home-studio, an hour from stockholm central, with commuter train and bus. Option to join seminar coordinator from SKH for joint travel. 

10.29-11.34

Public transport from t-centralen 

But the seminar begins already in your mouth when you brush your teeth before you leave home. Guiding score (click to be guided by sound/voice):

It continues in your fingers when you walk to your train stop. Guiding score (click to be guided by sound/voice):

It moves on with the train, as you synch the passing landscape with the movements of your toes. Guiding score (click to be guided by sound/voice) :

(These short scores are meant to invite you into my sensorimotor engagements with this commute.)

11.34-12.00 

Bus stop welcome

Joint walk through forest

12.00-12.15

Getting situated at home-studio, sharing food and the exhibited works of Debora Elgeholm & Nedine Kachornamsong.

12.15-13.15

Presentation of practice through the lens of  1: sensorimotor processing and 2: niche making and 3: shutdowns and refusals.
First: making ourselves comfortable  

Presentation by Lina: 


13.15-14.00

Stretch and yawn break & experiencing the space in choosen format.

14.00-15.00

Response 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 offering background and preparation :

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 also regulate my own impact on them so that we can both sustain. This reciprocal 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 as 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 recent way of understanding my practice, as a way of knowing has been deeply shaped by conversations within the neurodivergent 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. 

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 together.

In the texts here on the side, I outline examples of how these three fundamental mechanisms have manifested in my practice throughout the project.

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. 

voice recording + printed text for participatory co-reading (For remote participants the text with your notations will be gathered retrospectively) 

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.

Score tba

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.

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 the bumps. Grit. Slippery curves.    4. Wish for smooth. Imagine speed. 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 shine. Marvel.     7. Continue racing until the track is a glide.  8 End when the teeth feel like a polished circuit.

DO NOT READ:

ranstopian Worldbuilding

- Sensorimotor attunement as a way to percieve, process and become with.

This practice draws from several different art traditions like worldbuilding, formal pattern explorations, repetitative and meditative practices like weaving or animating, conceptual withdrawals and opting-outs. The immateriality of fluxus experiences.

This practice channels a certain kind of realating and interacting with environments. It is not media specific, It applies whatever new techniques and materials that are available or suitable to attune to environments. However animation has a special place in this ever expanding toolbox. Though anything that facilitates a iterative interchange between sensory input from the environment with my motor outputs I can use. It is this tuning that is the central aspect of the practice.

I call the practice “trans”- because it moves me between things , and as I occilate, bounce between, everything becomes a bit unstable, it starts to shift, sometimes when I have a strong core I might shift the other things a lot, but other times it is mostly me that transforms.

I call the practice “topian” because it is dependent on place, the contexts and the environments I find myself in. And also the thing that is continuing when I shift environment (myself) is experienced as place, as inner world.

And I call it “worldbuilding” because that is what my agency feels like, this is what any creative act I carry out ammounts to – a piecing together of the different topias that collide, interact, attract each other

Here you find a collection of works & text that tries to convey how this works. They are organized in three categories. You can start reading anywhere, from the top, from the middle or from under, depending on your impulse. At the end of each work you will be pointed towards continuations. The same things will be deliberated in the different parts, but from different points of departures. No text is very important in itself, it is in how they connect and interweave that is the point, I am trying to make.

Inner Refusals and shutdowns functions as intuitive emergency break that interrupts sensorimotor niche creation (animated worldbuilding) when it has become destructive. I will here 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.

This text introduces my approach to niche-making.

 

 

This text introduces my approach to sensorimotor practices.

The commute scores I shared above 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 want to 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 a third 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 a different 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. 

Another intense refusal was the sudden resistance to printing the book for my storyworld. Here you can listen to my reflections around it, made for a recent event part of gibca extended. 

This text situates the somatic refusal in art traditions

These texts about "inbetweening animation" and "straight-ahead-animation" gives an example of sensorimotor channeling withing the animation practice:

 

This text situates niche-making in art traditions

This text situates sensorimotor processing in art traditions