Dear reader,
I have decided to start this journal out of the need to find a space to connect with others, at a time when meeting you in a physical space to share ideas and projects has become a challenge.
Additionally, because of my ongoing artistic interests in embodiment, sensory perception and landscape/place, I have struggled to make sense of this somewhat fast transition towards the virtual world of zoom meetings, online teaching, screenings, performances. While grateful to this technology for enabling us to continue working and creating, I am also aware of how impoverished this new world is, lacking in its multi-sensory dimensions, flattened and constrained within a screen.
It is not so much a problem of the screen because we all know what a magical window to other worlds a cinema screen (or a book for that matter) can be. In my view, it is really a question of balance: time and attention spent on the screen versus the time spent in the world that lies beyond it, made of analogue beings, moving along an analogue timeline, where there is no magic undo button to rid us of the responsibilities of consequences, where a crash means pain and breaking a glass means endless shards of glass.
I am not sure what answers there are, apart from feeling the need to speak, write, analyse what is happening, to be creative and imaginative in response, to be studying with attention how meaning and sense is born, in order to understand what is at stake when too much focus is on the virtual, and how balance can be regained again.
Over the coming weeks and months, I am planning to invite a number of creative individuals, to contribute to this project, to see what emerges. I welcome ideas and am open to proposals on the themes mentioned here and the ‘About‘ section.