Sensing with the Body

“There is something we have lost in our insistence on the body as something socially constructed and performative. The view of the body as a social [discursive] production has hidden the fact our body is a receptacle of powers, capacities and resistances, that have been developed in a long process of co-evolution with our natural environment, as well as inter-generational practices that have made it a natural limit to exploitation.”
--Silvia Federici, In Praise of the Dancing Body

Introduction

Sensing with the Body explores how human beings come to produce, know, and circulate climate and environmental data through performance throughout New York City. A series of extended interviews with dancers, curators, and scholars of theater brings focus to the diverse modes by which beings sense and produce environmental knowledge. Featured experts share how experimental narratives unfold through bodies (of human and non-human animals, of water and land) to offer alternative scenarios for the present and future. Furthermore, they attune to the ways that diverse bodies morph, react, or adapt to environmental shifts that may be invisible to the eye. The project will host at least one public storytelling event on February 4, 2020 (co-convened by Patricia Kim, Carolyn Hall, and Clarinda Mac Low) in which students, scholars, dancers, and activists will work together through a speculative storytelling and performance workshop.

Territorial acknowledgment: This project, including its conversations and workshops, take place on the unceded land of the Lenape peoples.

Sensing Data, Sensing Climate

How are you sensing climate change with and through your body?

This central question serves as an anchor for this year-long project that centers the data stories and climate experiences of communities in and around New York City. Dancers, performers, and theorists of theater from diverse backgrounds attempt to answer this question, while revealing the ways that the body might produce, translate, and circulate climate data and the narratives that describe it.

As such, the project has three broad goals:

Through its focus on performance, the project necessarily goes beyond traditional ways that we understand climate and environmental data to include embodied knowledges and collective memories that emerge from or are etched into local landscapes.
The project not only highlights the ways that bodies sense climate change and its data, but also attunes to the ways that the body itself morphs, reacts, or adapts to environmental shifts that are often invisible to the eye.
The project draws out the potential of speculative, experiential storytelling to compel climate action. In particular, this project examines how experimental narratives that unfold through bodies (of human and non-human animals, of water and land) might offer up alternative scenarios for the present and future.

These conversations will also unfold in the context of the Humanizing Data working group, supported by Urban Democracy Lab at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies at New York University. This working group considers the ways that data connects with people, nonhuman animals, and places throughout New York City. The group addresses several issues related to data, including what it is (and isn’t) and the ways it has (re)produced systems and experiences of inequality. It also explores the strategies we can adopt or imagine to subvert the limitations imposed by data. On the other hand, the group will discuss the data that local communities need to address challenges related to racial, gendered, and climate justice. To that end, participants think together about how arts-oriented engagements and storytelling can effectively communicate, circulate, and advocate for data.

The conversations and stories that emerge from Sensing with the Body will feature in an installation and symposium hosted by Data Refuge and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities in Philadelphia, PA in May 2020.

For more information, contact Patricia Eunji Kim at pek237 [at] nyu.edu.

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