Artist-in-residence Sophie Seita will lead a workshop which focuses on creative forms of description, documentation and access.
Description is a vital tool for artists, researchers, and educators to make a work available for analysis, discussion, archiving, or another sensory experience. It is also important for those unable to attend live events due to location, time zones, disabilities, neurodiversity, care responsibilities, or work schedules.
Drawing from translation theory, experimental poetry and sensory ethnography, the workshop will explore how to create multiple versions of a piece of writing to engage different senses and forms of presence. The workshop will also draw on insights from queer studies, disability studies and performance studies, emphasising the physicality and texture of writing and voice.
Activities will include experimenting with sensory ethnography, as well as techniques for notating, recording, or describing sounds, movements and live performances. Participants will explore forms like closed captions, audio descriptions and sensory writing to translate performance into new mediums. These experiments can involve your own work or that of others.
Participants will investigate how bodily experiences can inspire experimental writing practices that enhance access whilst also standing as artistic research. Participants will consider questions such as:
- How can we turn movement, gesture, or sound into vivid verbal imagery?
- How do we translate bodies and voices into new sensory forms?
- How can our writing create a sense of liveness, tactility and engagement for all audiences?
- How can poetic or performative writing reflect the qualities of the materials it describes?
No prior knowledge of any of the forms mentioned is required. Light refreshments will be provided.
This workshop forms part of Sophie Seita’s ongoing project Touching Language, which explores experimental queer writing ‘in and as’ performance through collaborative research, multi-sensory practice, creative access and teaching experiments.
