Elasticity is the capacity to stretch and return to a new initial state. It entails resistance and elastic resilience to produce movements like oscillation and vibration. It allows a material to deform when a force is exerted on it and, when the force is withdrawn, the elastic body returns to an origin, one that is never the same.
After stretching, compressing, bending, and returning, there is constant change in each elastic scene, in each elastic material, there is loss, wear, but also something is gained in the process of learning how to be elastic.
Elastic Media have the ability to adapt and react with flexibility to the forces of rigid infrastructures or norms, in society or in digital systems for instance. This implies media in constant reconfiguration that responds to internal and external forces, while containing an almost obsessive intention to come back to an impossible past, to a retro-future.
Together, we will analyze examples of elastic behaviors in the confrontations of communities: For instance, migrants have to adapt their culture in a foreign land. And colonized communities have to behave in response to external forces that arrive in their territories to extract "natural resources"—such as gold, copper, coltan and lithium—through extractivist systems. We will examine the elastic limits in these situations, using these cases as fundamental references for critically creating our works.
In this class, we will explore with elastic materials and develop elastic artefacts, instruments, algorithms and devices to perform with them. As well, we will program systems of code that will allow elastic behaviour inside the rigidities of the current digital world.
We will read the theories of Suely Rolnik, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Yásnaya Aguilar, Eduard Glissant, Arturo Escobar, and Catherine Malabou to examine moments of elasticity in their texts. These readings will help us develop our own embodied theory of elasticity and connect it to the elastic artifacts/instruments we create.

This class is developed with the contributions, workshops and collaborations of Susana Botero and Cristiam Sabogal from the Master in Design of the University of los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia)

Any question, please send me email to: ilopezdemesamoyano@hfk-bremen.de

Wednesdays from 10h till 14h
First meeting on the 9th of April at 10h

ongoing

Elastic Media:

Participatory Research

Assemblage of Water and Land

Elastic Media:

Performing with instruments to stretch, resist and return. Conducted by Icaro Lopez de Mesa Moyano

archive

Google Maps Doesn't Reach Here

Navigating Collective Landscapes

Counting, Performing, Computing: Measuring

"Nature" and (digital) Technology.Infrastructures of Matter. (for example: Water, Gold, Plastic) (Media Theory)

Queering the Archive

Improbable Meetings and Weird Landscapes: Feminist Environmental Writings and the Poethics of Storytelling

Too much to measure?

Potential Museum and Narrative Space

Artistic Research:

Collectivity in Action:

Exploring Rituals Through Automated Movements

Individual workshops II

Prompting Textuality

Fictions, Speculations and Imaginaries ( Part I )

The beginning before the beginning:

The Act of Writing

Intimate Knowledges of Werdersee – New Relationships in Theory and Practice

The Contaminated Bodies under Techno-capitalism, Double-edge Promises of “Development”

Individual workshops

From A Thousand Different Angles – How to research through your artistic practice

The Art of Applying

Powerful Structures:

Individual workshops I

When two hands touch, how close are they?* – on touch in theory and art

How to make believe

On Earth We Are Temporarily Beautiful

Reading Group A field guide to getting lost

Lena Heins