Panel: Fast OR Slow in Art Experiences
In this panel discussion, participants will respond to the concepts of digital disengagement, opting out, and slowing down, and reflect on the role these ideas play in their artistic practice and/or research.
Panelists:
Dr. Eirini Nedelkopoulou is a lecturer in digital arts at the University of Glasgow and one of the directors of the Immersive Experiences Lab. Her research primarily explores the tensions and potentialities between individual and collective forms of engagement in digital culture. Practices of digital care are central to her work. She is the co-editor of Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. Eirini is currently working on her monograph, In Solitude: The Philosophy of Digital Performance Encounters (Bloomsbury).
Iain Findlay-Walsh (he/him) is a sound artist, researcher and teacher exploring sound-based and autoethnographic methods for the study of personal listening. He releases sound art and music under the name 'Klaysstarr Nets' (Entr'acte, Pan y Rosas), with related writing on sound, media and perception appearing in journals and outlets including the Journal of Sonic Studies and Organised Sound. He is an editor of the experimental arts journal openwork.
Maria Sledmere’s work addresses issues of ecology, energy, gender, dreams and digital aesthetics. Recent books include the experimental monograph Midsummer Song (Hypercritique) (Tenement Press, 2024) and poetry collection, Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024). Her first book, The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021), was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2022. Languishing, cute, a book of Celtic sci-fi poetry co-written with Ian Macartney, is forthcoming in spring 2025 and a novella, The Indigo Hours, in autumn. Maria is director of post-internet publisher SPAM Press, one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. https://mariasledmere.com/
Kevin Leomo is a curator and practitioner of experimental music based in Glasgow. He is interested in silence, fragility, quietude, perception, and liminality. He works across text-based scores, non-standard notation, improvisation, field recording, critical listening practices, and installation. Kevin’s practice has been informed by an engagement with artists associated with Wandelweiser. He co-curates the Creatives of Colour Festival as well as Thinking Culture and Music in the University. Kevin directs the experimental music collective Sound Thought, is one half of Project Somnolence, and is the Community and Engagement Manager for the College of Arts & Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
Take Me Somewhere
Take Me Somewhere is an international, biennial festival and year-round sector support organisation that exists to position Scotland as the place to create and experience radical performance. Building on the legacy of The Arches arts venue, following its closure in 2015, Take Me Somewhere provides a crucial support structure and platform for Scotland’s most vital artists, and showcases some of the world’s most cutting-edge contemporary performance makers.
https://takemesomewhere.co.uk/
Tristan Partridge is a lecturer in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His ethnographic research addresses the dynamics of collaboration within struggles for environmental justice in India, Ecuador, and the USA. This work also draws on aural anthropology and visual methods: Tristan has written text scores for The Center For Deep Listening and his fieldwork photography has been exhibited internationally. His recent book, Burning Diagrams in Anthropology: An Inverse Museum (punctum, 2024) is a critical history of academic complicity in hierarchical and racialized relations of inequality. In 2022 Tristan co-founded the CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work as a hub for exploring practices of care and connectedness between peoples, lands, waters, and multispecies kin.
Professor Jorge Lopes Ramos is a multi-award-winning artist and producer conducting word-leading creative research in the intersections of interactive performance, serious games and disability arts.
Born and raised within Borel (one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas) to a Polish/Romanian/Ukrainian family, Jorge is co-founder and Executive Director of disabled-led theatre/digital arts company ZU-UK with Yemeni-British Artistic Director Persis Jadé Maravala. Their artworks aim to challenge invisible privilege and lower barriers for participation, when a quarter of the UK population is disabled and half is working class. In a world where mainstream narratives thrive on hate, division and fear, Persis Jadé and Jorge believe in the harnessing depth of knowledge in lived experience to create new models that help us rethink our shared realities.
Jorge's artistic work has won awards and nominations in the fields of immersive theatre, hybrid art, technology and social impact. He works as Professor of Interactive Theatre and Performance at the University of Greenwich and leads SIMFONIK - a new audio-led Immersive Platform transforming empathy skills in Healthcare Simulation through patients' lived experience of Mental Health services.