MELT: Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr
shifting temporality in arts-design practice: making/breaking timelines
Block seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
3 Wednesdays, 14-20h: 3.5., 24.5., 31.5. (Outro session 14-16h)
2 Saturdays, 11h-17h: 13.5. (online) & 27.5.2023
Bundesallee 1-12, room 340

Registration on Moodle starts on the 17th of April / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 17.4.2023: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=1856
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: crip

Much of Trans* and disability theorising and making relates to temporal experiences and temporal shifts, loops, and discontinuities that gendered, neurological and embodied nonconformity bring about.

Considering theories of time such as crip time (Samuels 2017, Kafer 2013) and Trans*time (Amin 2014, Carter 2017), thinking through personal and collective (non)gender(ed) timelines, and learning about concepts such as spoon theory, pacing, and stimming, this course will time-travel through different Trans*crip hirstories, presents and futures. Experimenting with representations of time, students will develop spatial settings that shift an exhibition visitor's experience of time. Learning outcomes will include an introduction to critical disability studies and its relations to time, working with less immediately perceptible time-based media (what often comes up is video, but what about plastic, latex, waste or other materials around us as recording tools), and political orientations towards time that unmake temporal normativities against what Taraneh Fazeli has termed capitalism's temporal bullying. In this block seminar we will work with sensory practices that shift our experience of time like experimenting with heat, weight, movement and sound. All activities will work with access practices like starting with our access needs, establishing collective conditions and planning for changes in our naming practices. We practice with an experimental methodological framework that privileges trans* and disabled people and borrows from trans* and crip theory to reconsider temporal relations, for example through spoon theory. Let's break time to make time that fits our bodyminds!

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Regular attendance and engagement in a form accessible to you (verbal discussion, contributions via the chat/written form, bringing some materials into class).

MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) study and experiment with shape-shifting processes as they meet technologies, sensory media and pedagogies in a warming world. MELT currently builds projects along four different research tracks: ACCESS SERVER, The Meltionary, Counting Feelings and Zeitgeber. Their arts-design research cooks up practices that generate material and infrastructional transformations that intersect Trans* feminism and Disability Justice. Working with change and MELT(ing) as a kaleidoscope their work engages multiple topics at once: climate change, the potential for political reformulations, change over time and material transformation. MELT shares work in the forms of videos, installations, websites, lectures and workshops.